Special Topics in Calamity Physics

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SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS a novel...

The resulting explosion of energy, light, heartbreak, and wonder as Blue van Meer enters a small, elite school in a sleepy mountain town . . . Blue's highly unusual past draws her to a charismatic group of friends at St. Galiway (see page 2, "wild, wayward youths," Everyman Parenting) and their captivating teacher, Hannah Schneider. A sudden drowning, a series of inexplicable events, and finally the shocking death of .. herself lead to a confluence of mysteries. And Blue is left to make sense of it all with only her gimlet-eyed instincts and cultural lexicon to guide her. So, using B for Blue as a constant, th f Most of the Western Canot v Hitchcock

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Youthful [ Che , Film _ A Great, 1 Guilelessness yGuevara Noir Staggering Blow/

Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Apply to life at your own risk.

Blue van Meer s world of intellect, murder, and mystery is smart, edgy, and irresistible. " —Susan Richards Shreve, author of A Student of Living Things

U.S. $35.95 Canada $34.00

B l u e van Meer: a brainy, deadpan, and preternaturally erudite girl who, after traveling from one remote academic outpost to another with her professor father (see "Gareth van Meer"), has a head crammed full of literary, philosophical, and scientific knowledge. (She is also a film buff and can recite pi out to sixtyfive decimal places.) When she is sixteen, due to certain nuclear events, her previously dull life is forever transformed. The Flying Demoiselle: an archaic means of hanging someone, popular in the American South between 1 8 2 9 - 1 8 6 0 . It is also, in all likelihood, how Hannah Schneider died. Gareth Van Meer: a handsome yet maddening man prone to aphorisms, meteoric affairs, (see "June bugs"), and high-end bourbon. June bugs: single women aged 3 5 - 4 5 who, for reasons unclear to Blue, cling to her father like lint balls to wool pants. Lion sex: something that happens in Room 222 of the Dynasty Motel. Valerio: a clue.

0806

MARISHA

PESSL

grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and now lives in New York City. This is her first novel.

www.marishapessl.com

Jacket design: Paul Buckley Back jacket photograph © Adalberto Rios Szalay/ Sexto Sol/Getty Images

VIKING A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York. N.Y. 10014 www.penguin.com I Printed in U.S.A.

g CAL risfia Pess

VIKING

SICS

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pry Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pry) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 10 9

8 7

Copyright © Marisha Pessl, 2006 All rights reserved Illustrations by the author Publisher's Note This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Pessl, Marisha. Special topics in calamity physics / Marisha Pessl. p. cm. ISBN 0670-03777-X 1. Young women—Fiction. I. Title. PS3616.E825S67 2006 813'.6—dc22 2005058474 Printed in the United States of America Set in Electra LH with Omatic Designed by Daniel Lagin Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

For Anne and Nie

Core Curriculum (Required Reading INTRODUCTION

PART 1 Chapter #1: OTHELLO, William Shakespeare

5

13 15

Chapter #2: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, James Joyce Chapter #3: WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Emily Brontë

22 35

Chapter #4: THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, Nathaniel Hawthorne

45

Chapter #5: THE WOMAN IN WHITE, Wilkie Collins

54

Chapter #6: BRAVE NEW WORLD, Aldous Huxley

61

Chapter #7: LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

73

Chapter #8: MADAME BOVARY, Gustave Flaubert

83

Chapter #9: PYGMALION, George Bernard Shaw

108

Chapter #10: THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES, Agatha Christie

131

2 CORE CURRICULUM (REQUIRED READING)

PART

2

147

Chapter #11: MOBY-DICK, Herman Melville

149

Chapter #12: A MOVEABLE FEAST, Ernest Hemingway

171

Chapter #13: WOMEN IN LOVE, D. H. Lawrence

193

Chapter #14: "THE HOUSEBREAKER OF SHADY HILL," John Cheever

211

Chapter #15: SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, Tennessee Williams

230

Chapter #16: LAUGHTER IN THE DARK, Vladimir Nabokov Chapter #17: THE SLEEPING BEAUTY AND OTHER FAIRY TALES, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

242

Chapter #18: A ROOM WITH A VIEW, E. M. Forster

262

PART 3

277

Chapter #19: HOWL AND OTHER POEMS, Allen Ginsberg

254

279

Chapter #20: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, William Shakespeare 293 Chapter #21: DELIVERANCE, James Dickey Chapter #22: HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad

311 328

Chapter #23: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, Ken Kesey 337 Chapter #24: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Gabriel García Márquez

Chapter #25: BLEAK HOUSE, Charles Dickens Chapter #26: THE BIG SLEEP, Raymond Chandler

346

361 375

Chapter #27: JUSTINE, Marquis de Sade 385 Chapter #28: QUER PASTICCIACCIO BRUTTO DEVIAMERULANA, Carlo Emilio Gadda 403 Chapter #29: THINGS FALL APART, Chinua Achebe

413

CORE CURRICULUM (REQUIRED READING) 3 Chapter #30: THE NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACY, Smoke Wyannoch Harvey

Chapter #31: CHE GUEVARA TALKS TO YOUNG Ernesto Guevara de la Serna

426

PEOPLE, 436

Chapter #32: "GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE," Flannery O'Connor

457

Chapter #33: THE TRIAL, Franz Kafka

460

Chapter #34: PARADISE LOST, John Milton

471

Chapter #35: THE SECRET GARDEN, Frances Hodgson Burnett

479

Chapter #36: METAMORPHOSES, Ovid

495

FINAL EXAM

509

Introduction

(

ad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.

"Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond—James Bond—you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began—with a wheeze." Given such rigid parameters, I always assumed I wouldn't have my Magnificent Reason until I was at least seventy, with liver spots, rheumatism, wit as quick as a carving knife, a squat stucco house in Avignon (where I could be found eating 365 different cheeses), a lover twenty years my junior who worked in the fields (I don't know what kind of fields—any kind that were gold and frothy) and, with any luck, a small triumph of science or philosophy to my name. And yet the decision —no, the grave necessity—to take pen to paper and write about my childhood—most critically, the year it unstitched like a snagged sweater—came much sooner than I ever imagined. It began with simple sleeplessness. It had been almost a year since I'd found Hannah dead, and I thought I'd managed to erase all traces of that night within myself, much in the way Henry Higgins with his relentless elocution exercises had scrubbed away Eliza's Cockney accent. I was wrong. By the end of January, I again found myself awake in the dead of night, the hall hushed, dark, spiky shadows crouching in the edges of the ceiling. I

6 MAR1SHA PESSL had nothing and no one to my name but a few fat, smug textbooks like Introduction to Astrophysics and sad, silent James Dean gazing down at me where he was trapped in black and white and taped to the back of our door. I'd stare back at him through the smudged darkness, and see, in microscopic detail, Hannah Schneider. She hung three feet above the ground by an orange electrical extension cord. Her tongue — bloated, the cherry pink of a kitchen sponge —slumped from her mouth. Her eyes looked like acorns, or dull pennies, or two black buttons off an overcoat kids might stick into the face of a snowman, and they saw nothing. Or else that was the problem, they'd seen everything; J. B. Tower wrote that the moment before death is "seeing everything that has ever existed all at once" (though I wondered how he knew this, as he was in the prime of life when he wrote Mortality). And her shoelaces—an entire treatise could be written on those shoelaces—they were crimson, symmetrical, tied in perfect double knots. Still, being an inveterate optimist ("Van Meers are natural idealists and affirmative freethinkers," noted Dad) I hoped lurid wakefulness might be a phase I'd quickly grow out of, a fad of some kind, like poodle skirts or having a pet rock, but then, one night early in February as I read The Aeneid, my roommate, Soo-Jin, mentioned without looking up from her Organic Chemistry textbook that some of the freshmen on our hall were planning to crash an off-campus party at some doctor of philosophy's but I wasn't invited because I was considered more than a little "bleak" in demeanor: "Especially in the morning when you're on your way to Intro to '60s Counterculture and the New Left. You look so like, afflicted." This, of course, was only Soo-Jin talking (Soo-Jin whose face employed the same countenance for both Anger and Elation). I did my best to wave away this remark, as if it were nothing more than an unpleasant odor coming off a beaker or test tube, but then I did start to notice all kinds of unquestionably bleak things. For example, when Bethany brought people into her room for a Friday night Audrey Hepburn marathon, I was distinctly aware, at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany's, unlike the other girls sitting on pillows chainsmoking with tears in their eyes, I actually found myself hoping Holly didn't find Cat. No, if I was completely honest with myself, I realized I wanted Cat to stay lost and abandoned, mewing and shivering all by its Cat self in those splintery crates in that awful Tin Pan Alleyway, which from the rate of that Hollywood downpour would be submerged under the Pacific Ocean in less than an hour. (This I disguised, of course, smiling gaily when George Peppard

SPECIAL TOPICS m CALAMITY PHYSICS 7 feverishly grasped Audrey feverishly grasping Cat who no longer looked like a cat but a drowned squirrel. I believe I even uttered one of those girly, highpitched, "Ewws," in perfect harmony with Bethany's sighs.) And that wasn't the end of it. A couple of days later, I was in American Biography, led by our Teaching Assistant, Glenn Oakley, with his cornbread complexion and habit of swallowing right in the middle of a word. He was discussing Gertrude Stein's deathbed. " 'So what is the answer, Gertrude?' " Glenn quoted in his pretentious whisper, his left hand up as if holding an invisible parasol, pinky outstretched. (He resembled Alice B. Toklas with that specter-mustache.) " 'Well, Alice, what is the quest-gurg/i-tion?' " I stifled a yawn, happened to glance down at my notebook and saw, in horror, I'd absentmindedly been scribbling in strange loopy cursive a very disturbing word: good-bye. On its own it was breathy and harmless, sure, but I'd happened to scrawl it like some heartbroken lunatic at least forty times down the entire margin of the page —a little bit on the preceding page too. "Can anyone tell me what Ger-gu//?-trude meant by such a statement? Blue? No? Could you stay with us please? What about you, Shilla?" "It's obvious. She was talking about the insufferable vacuity of subsistence." "Very good." It appeared, in spite of my concerted efforts to the contrary (I wore fuzzy sweaters in yellow and pink, fixed my hair into what I considered a very upbeat ponytail), I had started to twist into that very something I'd been afraid of, ever since all of it had happened. I was becoming Wooden and Warped (mere rest stops on the highway to Hopping Mad), the kind of person who, in middle age, winced at children, or deliberately raced into a dense flock of pigeons minding their own business as they pecked at crumbs. Certainly, I'd always felt chills tiptoeing down my spine when I came across an eerily resonant newspaper headline or advertisement: "Steel Magnate Sudden Death at 50, Cardiac Arrest," "CAMPING EQUIPMENT LIQUIDATION SALE." But I always told myself that everyone —at least everyone fascinating—had a few scars. And scars didn't necessarily mean one couldn't be, say, more Katharine Hepburn than Captain Queeg when it came to overall outlook and demeanor, a little more Sandra Dee than Scrooge. My gradual decent into grimdom might have continued unabated, had it not been for a certain startling phone call one cold March afternoon. It was almost a year to the day after Hannah died.

8 MAR1SHA PESSL "You/' said Soo-Jin, barely turning from Diagram 2114.74 "Amino Acids and Peptides" to hand me the phone. "Hello?" "Hi. It's me. Your past." I couldn't breathe. It was unmistakable—her low voice of sex and highways, equal parts Marilyn and Charles Kuralt, but it had changed. If once it had been sugared and crackly, now it was porridged, grueled. "Don't worry/' Jade said. "I'm not catching up with you." She laughed, a short, Ha laugh, like a foot kicking a rock. "I no longer smoke," she announced, obviously quite proud of herself, and then she went on to explain that after St. Gallway she hadn't made it to college. Instead, due to her "troubles" she'd voluntarily admitted herself to a "Narnia kind of place" where people talked about their feelings and learned to watercolor fruit. Jade hinted excitedly that a "really huge rock star" had been in residence on her floor, the comparatively well-adjusted third floor ("not as suicidal as the fourth or as manic as the second") and they'd become "close," but to reveal his name would be to forsake everything she'd learned during her ten-month "growth period" at Heathridge Park. (Jade now, I realized, saw herself as some sort of herbaceous vine or creeper.) One of the parameters of her "graduation," she explained (she used this word, probably because it was preferable to "release") was that she tie up Loose Ends. I was a Loose End. "So how are you?" she asked. "How's life? Your dad?" "He's fantastic." "And Harvard?" "Fine." "Well, that brings me to the purpose of the call, an apology, which I will not dodge or do unconvincingly," she said officially, which made me sort of sad, because it sounded nothing at all like the Real Jade. The Jade I knew, as a rule, always dodged apology and, if forced, did it unconvincingly, but this was the Jade Vine (Strongylodon macrobotrys), a member of the Leguminosae family, distantly related to the humble garden pea. "I'm sorry for the way I behaved. I know what happened had nothing to do with you. She just lost it, you know. People do that all the time and they always have their own reasons. Please accept my request for forgiveness." I thought about interrupting her with my little cliff-hanger, my aboutface, my kick in the teeth, myfineprint: "Actually, to be technical about the whole thing, uh . .." But I couldn't do it. Not only did I not have the courage,

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 9 I didn't see the point of telling her the truth —not now. Jade was blooming, after all, receiving ideal amounts of sun exposure and water, displaying promising signs of reaching her maximum height of seventy feet, and would eventually expand via seeds, stem-cutting in the summer, layering in the spring, to overtake the entire side of a stone wall. My words would have the effect of a one-hundred-day drought. The rest of the call was a fervid exchange of "so give me your e-mail," and "let's plan big reunions"—paper-doll pleasantness that did little to cover the fact we'd never see each other again and would rarely speak. I was aware as ever that she, and maybe the others too, would occasionally float over to me like pollen off a withered dandelion with news of sugarplum marriages, gooey divorces, moves to Florida, a new job in real estate, but there was nothing keeping them and they'd drift away as simply and randomly as they'd come. Later that day, as Fate would have it, I had my "Greek and Roman Epic" lecture with Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, Zolo Kydd. Students called Zolo "Rolo," because, if only in stature and complexion, he happened to resemble that particular chewable chocolate caramel candy. He was short, tan and round, wore bright plaid Christmas pants regardless of the time of year, and his thick, yellow-white hair encrusted his shiny freckled forehead as if, ages ago, Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing had been dribbled all over him. Customarily, by the end of Zolo's lectures on "Gods and Godlessness" or "The Beginning and the End," most students had nodded off; unlike Dad, Zolo had an anesthetizing delivery style, which had to do with his run-on sentences and tendency to repeat a certain word, usually a preposition or adjective, in a way that brought to mind a small green frog bouncing across lily pads. And yet, on this particular afternoon, my heart was in my throat. I hung on his every word. "Came across a-a-a funny little editorial the other day about Homer," Zolo was saying, frowning down at the podium and sniffing. (Zolo sniffed when he was nervous, when he'd made the brave decision to leave the safe bank of his lecture notes and drift away on a shaky digression.) "It was in a small journal, I encourage all of you to take a look at it in the library, the-thethe little-known, Classic Epic and Modern America. Winter volume, I believe. It turns out, a year ago, a couple of wacko Greek and Latinists like myself wanted to conduct an experiment on the power of the epic. They arranged to give copies of The Odyssey to-to-to a hundred of the most hardened criminals

10 MAR1SHÂ PESSL at a maximum-security prison—Riverbend, I think it was—and would you know it, twenty of the convicts read the thing cover to cover, and three of them sat down and wrote their own epic tales. One is going to be published next year by Oxford University Press. The article discussed epic poetry as a very viable means to reform the-the-the deadliest offenders in the world. Itit appears, funnily enough, there's something within it that lessens the rage, the-the stress, pain, brings about, even to those who are far, far, gone, a sense of hope—because there's an absence in this day and age of real heroism. Where are the noble heroes? The great deeds? Where are the gods, the muses, the warriors? Where is ancient Rome? Well, they have to-to-to be somewhere, don't they, because according to Plutarch, history repeats itself. If only we'd have the nerve to look for it in-in ourselves, it just-it just might—" I don't know what came over me. Maybe it was Zolo's perspiring face, festively reflecting the overhead fluorescents like a river reflecting carnival light, or the way he gripped the podium as if without it he'd collapse into a pile of brightly colored laundry— direct contrast to Dad's posture on any stage or raised platform. Dad, as he expounded upon Third World Reform (or whatever he felt like expounding upon; Dad was neither intimidated by, nor nervy around, the Verbal Foray on-the-Fly or the Apropos Excursion), always stood without the slightest slouch or sway. ("While lecturing, I always imagine myself a Doric column on the Parthenon," he said.) Without thinking, I stood up, my heart heaving against my ribs. Zolo stopped midsentence and he, along with the other three hundred drowsy students in the lecture hall, stared at me as I, head down, hacked through backpacks, outstretched legs, overcoats, sneakers and textbooks to get to the nearest aisle. I lurched toward the double EXIT doors. "There goes Achilles," Zolo quipped into the microphone. There were a few tired laughs. I ran back to the dorm. I sat down at my desk, laid out a three-inch stack of white paper and hastily began to scrawl this Introduction, which originally started with what happened to Charles, after he'd broken his leg in three places and had been rescued by the National Guard. Supposedly he'd been in such pain he couldn't stop shouting, "God help me!" over and over again. Charles had a terrifying voice when he was upset, and I couldn't help but think those words had minds of their own, floating up like helium balloons through the sterile halls of the Burns County Hospital, all the way to the

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS n Maternity Ward, so every child entering the world that morning heard his screams. Of course, "Once upon a time there was a beautiful, sad little boy named Charles" wasn't exactly fair. Charles was St. Gallway's dreamboat, its Doctor Zhivago, its Destry Rides Again. He was the gold-limbed kid Fitzgerald would've picked out of the senior class photo and described with sun-soaked words like "patrician" and "of eternal reassurance." Charles would fiercely object to my beginning any story with his moment of indignity. Again I was at a standstill (I wondered how those hard-edged convicts had managed, against the odds and with such flair, to conquer the Blank Page), yet just as I threw those crumpled pages into the trash can under Einstein (miserably held hostage on the wall next to Soo-Jin's ill-conceived "To Do or Not to Do" bulletin board), I suddenly remembered something Dad once said back in Enid, Oklahoma. He was paging through a remarkably attractive course catalogue for the University of Utah at Rockwell, which, if memory serves, had just offered him a visiting professorship. "There is nothing more arresting than a disciplined course of instruction," he said abruptly. I must have rolled my eyes or grimaced, because he shook his head, stood up and shoved the thing—an impressive two inches thick—into my hands. "I'm serious. Is there anything more glorious than a professor? Forget about his molding the minds, the future of a nation—a dubious assertion; there's little you can do when they tend to emerge from the womb predestined for Grand Theft Auto Vice City. No. What I mean is, a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life —not the whole thing, God no—simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order—simply divine. The symmetry of a semester course. Consider the words themselves: the seminar, the tutorial, the advanced whatever workshop accessible only to seniors, to graduate fellows, to doctoral candidates, the practicum—what a marvelous word: practicuml You think me crazy. Consider a Kandinsky. Utterly muddled, put a frame around it, voilà—looks rather quaint above the fireplace. And so it is with the curriculum. That celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam. And what is the Final Exam? A test of one's deepest understanding of giant concepts. No

12 MÀRISHA PESSL wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines— ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives . . ." I told Dad he'd lost his mind. He laughed. "One day you'll see," he said with a wink. "And remember. Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, where possible, provide staggering Visual Aids, because, trust me, there will always be some clown sitting in the back—somewhere by the radiator—who will raise his fat, flipperlike hand and complain, 'No, no, you've got it all wrong.' " I swallowed, staring down at the blank page. I triple-lutzed the ink pen in my fingers, my gaze falling out the window where, down in Harvard Yard, solemn students, winter scarves wrapped tightly around their necks, hurried down the paths and across the grass. " 'I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile,' " Zolo had sung only a few weeks ago, bizarrely tapping his foot on every other word so the cuffs of his plaid pants raised and you caught an unwelcome glimpse of his toothpick ankles and dainty white socks. I took a deep breath. At the top of the page, I wrote in my neatest handwriting, "Curriculum," and then, "Required Reading." That was always how Dad began.

Il

Oikdh

I efore I tell you about Hannah Schneider's death, I'll tell you about my .mother's. At 3:10 P.M. on September 17, 1992, two days before she was to pick up the new blue Volvo station wagon at Dean King's Volvo and Infiniti dealership in Oxford, my mother, Natasha Alicia Bridges van Meer, driving her white Plymouth Horizon (the car Dad had nicknamed Certain Death) crashed through a guardrail along Mississippi State Highway 7 and hit a wall of trees. She was killed instantly. I would've been killed instantly too if Dad had not, by that strange, oily hand of Fate, telephoned my mother around lunch to tell her that she didn't need to pick me up from Calhoun Elementary as she always did. Dad had decided to blow off the kids who always hung around after his Political Science 400a: Conflict Resolution class to pose illconsidered questions. He'd pick me up from Ms. Jetty's kindergarten and we'd spend the rest of the day at the Mississippi Wildlife Conservatory Project in Water Valley. While Dad and I learned that Mississippi had one of the best deer management programs in the country with a population of 1.75 million whitetailed deer (surpassed only by Texas), rescue crews were trying to extricate my mother's body from the totaled car with the Jaws of Life. Dad, on Mom: "Your mother was an arabesque." Dad was fond of using ballet terms to describe her (other favorites include attitude, ciseaux and balancé), in part because she trained as a girl for seven years at the famed Larson Ballet Conservatory in New York (quitting, per her parents wishes, to attend The Ivy School on East 81st Street) but also

16 MARISHÀ PESSL because she lived her life with beauty and discipline. "Though classically trained, early in life Natasha developed her own technique and was seen by her family and friends as quite radical for the era," he said, alluding to her parents, George and Geneva Bridges, and her childhood peers who didn't understand why Natasha chose to live not in her parents' five-story townhouse near Madison Avenue but in a studio in Astoria, why she worked not for American Express or Coca-Cola, but for NORM (Non-profit Organization for Recovering Mothers), why she fell for Dad, a man thirteen years her senior. After he'd had three shots of bourbon, Dad was known to talk about the night they met in the Pharaoh Room of the Edward Stillman Collection of Egyptian Art on East 86th Street. He saw her across a crowded room of mummified limbs of Egyptian kings and people eating duck at $1,000 a head with proceeds going toward a charity for orphaned children in the Third World. (Dad, quite fortuitously, had been given the two tickets by a tenured university colleague unable to attend. I can therefore thank Columbia Political Science Professor Arnold B. Levy and his wife's diabetes for my existence.) Natasha's dress had a tendency to change colors in his memory. Sometimes she was "wrapped in a dove-white dress accenting her perfect figure, which made her as arresting as Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice." Other times she was wearing "all red." Dad had brought a date, a Miss Lucy Marie Miller of Ithaca who was a new Associate Professor in Columbia's English Department. Dad could never remember what color she was wearing. He didn't even remember seeing Lucy, or saying good-bye to her after their brief discussion about King Taa II's hip's remarkable state of preservation, because, moments later, he spotted the pale blond, aristocratically nosed Natasha Bridges standing in front of the knee and lower thigh of Ahmosis IV, chatting absentmindedly with her date, Nelson L. Aimes of the San Francisco Aimeses. "The kid had the charisma of a throw rug," Dad liked to recall, though sometimes in his accounts the unfortunate Mr. Aimes was only guilty of "weak posture" and "a hedge of a hairline." Theirs was a brutal romance of fairy tales, replete with wicked queen, bungling king, stunning princess, impoverished prince, a love that was enchanted (caused birds and other furry creatures to congregate on a windowsill)—and one Final Curse. "You vill die unhappy vith him," Geneva Bridges allegedly said to my mother during their last telephone conversation.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 17 Dad was at a loss when asked to articulate exactly why George and Geneva Bridges were so unimpressed with him when the rest of the world was. Gareth van Meer, born July 25, 1947, in Biel, Switzerland, never knew his parents (though he suspected his father was a German soldier in hiding) and grew up in a Zurich orphanage for boys where Love (Liebe) and Understanding (Verstdndnis) were as likely to make personal appearances as the Rat Pack (DerRatte-Satz). With nothing but his "iron will" pushing himself toward "greatness," Dad earned a scholarship to the University of Lausanne to study economics, taught social science for two years at the Jefferson International School in Kampala, Uganda, worked as Assistant to the Director for Guidance and Academics at the Dias-Gonzales School in Managua, Nicaragua, and came to America for the first time in 1972. In 1978, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, completing a highly regarded dissertation, "The Curse of the Freedom Fighter: Fallacies of Guerrilla Warfare and Third-World Revolution." He spent the next four years teaching in Cali, Colombia, and then Cairo, while in his spare time conducting fieldwork in Haiti, Cuba and various African countries, including Zambia, Sudan and South Africa, for a book on territorial conflict and foreign aid. Returning to the United States he became a Harold H. Clarkson Professor of Political Science at Brown, and in 1986, an Ira F. Rosenblum Professor of World Order Studies at Columbia University, also publishing his first book, The Powers That Be (Harvard University Press, 1987). That year he was awarded six different honors, including the Mandela Award of the American Political Science Institute and the esteemed McNeely Prize of International Affairs. When George and Geneva Bridges of 16 East 64th Street met Gareth van Meer, however, they didn't award him any prizes, not even an Honorable Mention. "Geneva was Jewish and she loathed my German accent. Never mind that her family was from St. Petersburg and she had an accent too. Geneva complained that every time she heard me she thought of Dachau. I tried to curb it, an effort that brought me to the squeaky clean accent I have today. Ah, well," Dad sighed and waved in the air, his gesture of When All's Said and Done. "I suppose they didn't think I was good enough. They had plans to marry her off to one of those pretty boys with hair mannerisms and a preponderance of real estate, someone who hadn't seen the world, or if he had, only through the windows of a Presidential Suite at the Ritz. They didn't understand her."

18 MÂR1SHA PESSL And so my mother, "tying her duty, beauty, wit and fortunes / In an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere," fell for Dad's tales of flood and field. They were married at a registrar in Pitts, New Jersey, with two witnesses recruited from a highway Huddle House: one, a truck driver; the other, a waitress named Peaches who hadn't slept in four days and yawned thirty-two times (Dad counted) during the exchange of vows. Around this time Dad had been having disagreements with the conservative head of the Political Science Department at Columbia, culminating in a major blowout over an article Dad published in The Federal Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled "Steel-Toe Stilettos: The Designer Fashions of American Foreign Aid" (Vol. 45, No. 2,1987). He quit midsemester. They moved to Oxford, Mississippi. Dad took a position teaching Conflict Resolution in the Third World at Ole Miss, while my mother worked for the Red Cross and began to catch butterflies. I was born five months later. My mother decided to call me Blue, because for her first year of Lepidoptera study with the Southern Belles' Association of Butterflies, with its Tuesday night meetings at the First Baptist Church (lectures included "Habitat, Conservation and Hindwing Coupling," as well as "Attractive Showcase Display"), the Cassius Blue was the only butterfly Natasha could catch (see "Leptotes cassius" Butterfly Dictionary, Meld, 2001 éd.). She tried different nets (canvas, muslin, mesh), perfumes (honeysuckle, patchouli), the various stalking techniques (upwind, downwind, crosswind) and the many netting swings (the Swoop, the Shorthanded Jackknife, the Lowsell-Pit Maneuver). Beatrice "Bee" Lowsell, President of SBAB, even met privately with Natasha on Sunday afternoons to coach her on Modes of the Butterfly Chase (the Zigzag, the Indirect Pursuit, the Speedy Snag, the Recovery) as well as the Art of Hiding One's Shadow. Nothing worked. The Shy Yellow, the White Admiral, the Viceroy were repelled from my mother's net like two same-sided magnets. "Your mother decided it was a sign, so she decided to adore only catching Cassius Blues. She'd come home with about fifty of them every time she went into the fields and managed to become quite an expert on them. Sir Charles Erwin, Principal Lepidoptera Survival Specialist at the Surrey Museum of Insects in England, a man who evidently had appeared not once but four times on Bug Watch on the BBC, he actually phoned your mother to discuss Leptotes cassius feeding patterns on matured flowers of the lima bean." Whenever I voiced a particular hatred of my name, Dad always said the

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 19 same thing: "You should be happy she wasn't always catching the Swamp Metalmark or the Scarce Silver-spotted Flambeau." The Lafayette County Police told Dad Natasha had apparently fallen asleep at the wheel in broad daylight, and Dad admitted that, four or five months prior to the accident, Natasha had been known to work through the night on her butterflies. She'd fallen asleep in the oddest of places: cooking Dad Irish oatmeal at the stove, on the examination table as Dr. Moffet listened to her heart, even while riding the escalator between the first and second floors of Ridgeland Mall. "I told her not to work so hard on the bugs," Dad said. "After all, they were only a hobby. But she insisted on working through the night on those display cases, and she could be very bullheaded. When she had an idea, when she believed something, she wouldn't let go of it. And still—she was as fragile as her own butterflies, an artist who feels things deeply. To be sensitive is fine, but it makes day-to-day living—life —rather painful, I'd imagine. I used to joke that when someone cut down a tree in the Brazilian Amazon, or stepped on a fire ant, or when a sparrow flew smack into a sliding glass door, it hurt her." If it weren't for Dad's anecdotes and observations (his pas de deux and attitudes), I don't know how much of her I'd remember. I was five when she died, and unfortunately, unlike those geniuses who boast vivid memories of their own births ("An earthquake underwater," said renowned physicist Johann Schweitzer of the event. "Petrifying."), my memory of life in Mississippi stutters and stalls like an engine that refuses to turn over. Dad's favorite photograph of Natasha is the one in black and white, taken before she ever met him, when she was twenty-one and dressed for a Victorian costume party (Visual Aid 1.0). (I no longer have the original photograph and so, where appropriate, I've supplied illustrations, drawn from what I can remember.) Although she is in the foreground, she seems about to drown in the rest of the room, a room overflowing with "bourgeois belongings," as Dad would note with a sigh. (Those are real Picassos.) And although Natasha stares almost directly at the camera and has an elegant yet approachable look on her face, I never feel a spark of recognition while surveying this blonde of pronounced cheekbone and superb hair. Nor can I associate this refined person with the cool and assured sense I do remember, however vaguely: the feel of her wrist in my hand, smooth as polished wood, as she led me into a classroom with orange carpet and a stench

20 MAR1SHA PESSL

of glue, the way, when we were driving, her milky hair covered almost all of her right ear, though the edge still peeked out, barely, like a fish fin. The day she died is thin and insubstantial too, and though I think I remember Dad sitting in a white bedroom making strange, strangled noises into his hands, and everywhere the smell of pollen and wet leaves, I wonder if this is not a Forced Memory, born of necessity and "iron will." I do remember looking out to the spot where her white Plymouth had been parked by the lawn-mower shed, and seeing nothing but oil drips. And I remember, for a few days, until Dad was able to rearrange his lecture schedule, our next-door neighbor picked me up from kindergarten, a pretty woman in jeans who had short red porcupine hair and smelled of soap, and when we pulled into our driveway, she wouldn't immediately unlock the car, but gripped the steering wheel, whispering how sorry she was—not to me, but to the garage door. She'd then light a cigarette and sit very still as the smoke squirmed around the rearview mirror. I recall, too, how our house, once cumbersome and wheezing as a

SPECIAL TOPICS m CALAMITY PHYSICS 21 rheumatoid aunt, seemed tense and restrained without my mother, as if awaiting her return so it could feel comfortable to croak and groan again, allow the wooden floors to grimace under our hurried feet, let the screen door spank the door frame 2.25 times with every opening, consent to the curtain rods belching when an uncouth breeze barged through a window. The house simply refused to complain without her, and so until Dad and I packed up and left Oxford in 1993, it remained trapped in the ashamed, tight-lipped deportment required for Reverend Monty Howard's dull sermons at the New Presbyterian Church, where Dad dropped me every Sunday morning while he waited in the parking lot of the McDonald's across the street, eating hashbrowns and reading The New Republic. However not really remembered, you might imagine how a day like September 17, 1992, could float around in one's mind when a particular teacher couldn't remember one's name and finally called one "Green." I thought of September 17 at Poe-Richards Elementary, when I'd snuck into the murky stacks of the library to eat my lunch and read War and Peace (Tolstoy, 1865-69) or when Dad and I were driving a highway at night, and he'd lapsed into such strict silence, his profile looked carved on a totem pole. I'd stare out the window, at that black doily silhouette of passing trees, and experience an attack of the What Ifs. What If Dad hadn't picked me up from school and she'd come to get me and, knowing I was in the backseat, made particular effort not to fall asleep —unrolling the window so her glossy hair flew all over the place (exposing her entire right ear), singing along with one of her favorite songs on the radio, "Revolution" by the Beatles? Or What If she hadn't been asleep? What If she'd deliberately veered to the right at 80 mph crashing through the guardrail, colliding, head-on, with the wall of tulip poplar trees nine meters from the shoulder of the highway? Dad didn't like to talk about that. "That very morning your mother had talked to me of plans to enroll in a night class, Intro to Moths of North America, so rid yourself of such dour thoughts. Natasha was the victim of one too many butterfly nights." Dad gazed at the floor. "A sort of moth moon madness," he added quietly. He smiled then and looked back at me, where I was standing in the door, but his eyes were heavy, as if it required strength to hold them to my face. "We'll leave it at that," he said.

À Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man traveled. Due to the surprisingly high sales of The Powers That Be (compared to the other page-turners published by Harvard University Press that year, including Currency Abroad [Toney, 1987] and FDR and His Big Deal: A New Look at the First 100 Days [Robbe, 1987]), his impeccable twelve-page curriculum vitae, the frequent appearance of his essays in such respected, highly specialized (yet little-read) journals as International Affairs and American Policies and Daniel Hewitt's Federal Forum (not to mention a nomination in 1990 for the heralded Johann D. Stuart Prize for American Political Science Scholarship), Dad had managed to make enough of a name for himself to be a perennial visiting lecturer at political science departments across the country. Mind you, Dad no longer wooed top-tiered universities for their esteemed multinamed teaching positions: the Eliza Grey Peastone-Parkinson Professor of Government at Princeton, the Louisa May Holmo-Gilsendanner Professor of International Politics at MIT. (I assumed, given the extreme competition, these institutions weren't mourning Dad's absence from their "tight-knit circle of incest"—what he called highbrow academia.) No, Dad was now interested in bringing his erudition, international fieldwork experience and research to the bottom tiers ("bottom-feeders" he called them in a Bourbon Mood), the schools no one had ever heard of, sometimes not even the students enrolled in them: the Cheswick Colleges, the DodsonMiner Colleges, the Hattiesburg Colleges of Arts and Sciences and the Hicksburg State Colleges, the universities of Idaho and Oklahoma and Alabama at Runic, at Stanley, at Monterey, at Flitch, at Parkland, at Picayune, at Petal.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 23 "Why should I waste my time teaching puffed-up teenagers whose minds are curdled by arrogance and materialism? No, I shall spend my energies enlightening America's unassuming and ordinary. 'There's majesty in no one but the Common Man.' " (When questioned by colleagues as to why he no longer wished to educate the Ivy League, Dad adored waxing poetic on the Common Man. And yet, sometimes in private, particularly while grading a frighteningly flawed final exam or widely-off-the-mark research paper, even the illustrious, unspoiled Common Man could become, in Dad's eyes, a "half-wit," a "nimrod," a "monstrous misuse of matter.") An excerpt from Dad's personal University of Arkansas at Wilsonville Web page (www.uaw.edu/polisci/vanmeer): Dr. Gareth van Meer (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1978) is the Visiting Professor of Political Science for the 1997-1998 school year. He hails from Ole Miss, where he is Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of the United States. He is interested, broadly, in political and economic revitalization, military and humanitarian involvement, and post-conflict renewal of Third World nations. He is currently working on a book entitled The Iron Grip, about African and South American ethnic politics and civil war. Dad was always hailing from somewhere, usually Ole Miss, though we never went back to Oxford in the ten years we traveled. He was also always "currently working on The Iron Grip" though I knew as well as he did that the Grip —fifty-fivelegal pads filled with unintelligible handwriting (much of it water damaged), stored in a large cardboard box labeled in black permanent marker, GRIP—had not been worked on, currently or otherwise, in the last fifteen years. "America," Dad sighed as he drove the blue Volvo station wagon across another state line. Welcome to Florida, the Sunshine State. I flipped down the visor so I wasn't blinded. "Nothing like this country. No indeedy-o. Really is the Promised Land. Land of the Free and the Brave. Now how about that Sonnet number 30? You didn't finish. 'When to the sessions of sweet silent thought /1 summon up remembrance of things past.' Come on, I know you know this one. Speak up. 'And with old woes From second grade at Wadsworth Elementary in Wadsworth, Kentucky, until my senior year of high school at the St. Gallway School in Stockton,

24 MÀR1SHA PESSL North Carolina, I spent as much time in the blue Volvo as I did in a classroom. Although Dad always maintained an elaborate explanation for our itinerant existence (see below), I secretly imagined we wandered the country because he was fleeing my mother's ghost, or else he was looking for it in every rented two-bedroom house with a grouchy porch swing, every diner serving waffles tasting of sponge, every motel with pancake pillows, bald carpeting and TVs with a broken CONTRAST button so newscasters resembled Oompa Loompas. Dad, on Childrearing: "There's no education superior to travel. Think of The Motorcycle Diaries, or what Montrose St. Millet wrote in Ages of Exploration: 'To be still is to be stupid. To be stupid is to die.' And so we shall live. Every Betsy sitting next to you in a classroom will only know Maple Street on which sits her boxy white house, inside of which whimper her boxy white parents. After your travels, you'll know Maple Street, sure, but also wilderness and ruins, carnivals and the moon. You'll know the man sitting on an apple crate outside a gas station in Cheerless, Texas, who lost his legs in Vietnam, the woman in the tollbooth outside of Dismal, Delaware, in possession of six children, a husband with black lung but no teeth. When a teacher asks the class to interpret Paradise Lost, no one will be able to grab your coattails, sweet, for you will be flying far, far out in front of them all. For them, you will be a speck somewhere above the horizon. And thus, when you're ultimately set loose upon the world . . ." He shrugged, his smile lazy as an old dog. "I suspect you'll have no choice but to go down in history." Typically, our year was divided between three towns, September though December in one, January through June in another, July through August in a third, though occasionally this increased to a maximum of five towns in the span of one year, at the end of which I threatened to start sporting a burdensome amount of black eyeliner and baggy clothing. (Dad decided we'd return to the median number of three towns per year.) Driving with Dad wasn't cathartic, mind-freeing driving (see On the Road, Kerouac, 1957)- It was mind-taxing driving. It was Sonnet-a-thons. It was One Hundred Miles of Solitude: Attempting to Memorize The Waste Land. Dad could meticulously divide a state end to end, not into equal driving shifts but into rigid half-hour segments of Vocabulary Flash Cards (words every genius should know), Author Analogies ("the analogy is The Citadel of thought: the toughest way to condition unruly relationships"), Essay Recitation (followed by a twenty-minute question-and-answer period), War of the

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 25 Words (Coleridge/Wordsworth face-offs), Sixty Minutes of an Impressive Novel (selections included The Great Gatsby [Fitzgerald, 1925] and The Sound and the Fury [Faulkner, 1929], and The Van Meer Radio Theater Hour, featuring such plays as Mrs. Warrens Profession (Shaw, 1894), The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde, 1895) and various selections from Shakespeare's oeuvre, including the late romances. "Blue, I can't fully distinguish Gwendolyn's sophisticated upper-class accent from Cicely's girlish country one. Try to make them more distinct and, if I may give you a little Orson Wellian direction here, understand, in this scene they're quite angry. Do not lie back and pretend you're sitting down to a leisurely tea. No\ The stakes are high\ They both believe they're engaged to the same man! Ernest!" States later, eyes watery and focus sore, our voices hoarse, in the highway's evergreen twilight Dad would turn on, not the radio, but his favorite A. E. Housman Poetry on Wenlock Edge CD. We'd listen in silence to the steel-drum baritone of Sir Brady Heliwick of the Royal Shakespeare Company (recent roles included Richard in Richard 111, Titus in Titus Andronicus, Lear in King Lear) as he read "When I Was One-and-Twenty" and "To an Athlete Dying Young" against a sinuous violin. Sometimes Dad spoke the words along with Brady, trying to outdo him. Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. "Could have been an actor," said Dad, clearing his throat.

By examining the U.S. Rand-McNally map on which Dad and I marked with a red pushpin every town in which we'd lived, however brief the period ("Napoleon had a similar way of marking out his regime," Dad said), I calculate that, from my years six to sixteen we inhabited thirty-nine towns in thirty-three states, not including Oxford, and I thus attended approximately twenty-four elementary, middle and high schools. Dad used to joke that in my sleep I could pound out the book Hunting for Godot: Journey to Find a Decent School in America, but he was being unusually harsh. He taught at universities where "Student Center" referred to a deserted room with nothing but a foosball table and a vending machine with

26 MAR1SHA PESSL a few candy bars bravely tipped toward the glass. I, however, attended sprawling, freshly painted schools with slender corridors and beefy gyms: Schools of Many Teams (football, baseball, spirit, dance) and Schools of Many Lists (attendance, honor, headmaster's, detention); Schools Full of Newness (new arts center, parking lot, menu) and Schools Full of Oldness (which used the words classic and traditional in their admissions brochure); schools with snarling, sneering mascots, schools with pecking, preening mascots; the School of the Dazzling Library (with books smelling of glue and Mr. Clean); the School of the Bog Library (with books smelling of sweat and rat droppings), the School of Teary-Eyed Teachers; of Runny-Nosed Teachers; of Teachers Never Without Their Lukewarm Coffee Mug; of Teachers Who Cakewalked; of Teachers Who Cared; of Teachers Who Secretly Loathed Every One of the Little Bastards. When I introduced myself into the culture of these relatively welldeveloped nations, with firmly established rules and pecking orders, I didn't immediately don the status of the Drama Queen with Shifty Eyes or the Obnoxious Brain Who Wore Meticulously Ironed Madras. I wasn't even the New Girl, as that glittery title was always stolen from me within minutes of my arrival by someone fuller lipped and louder laughed than I. I'd like to say I was the Jane Goodall, a fearless stranger in a stranger land doing (groundbreaking) work without disturbing the natural hierarchy of the universe. But Dad said, based on his tribal experiences in Zambia, a title only has meaning when others fully support it, and I'm sure if someone asked the Tanned Sporto with Shiny Legs, she'd say if I had to be a Jane, I wasn't the Jane Goodall, nor was I the Plain Jane, the Calamity Jane, the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, and certainly not the Jayne Mansfield. I was more along the lines of the Pre-Rochester Jane Eyre, which she'd call by either of its pseudonyms, the I Don't Know Who You're Talking About or the Oh Yeah, Her. A brief description might be due here (Visual Aid 2.0). Obviously, I am the half-obscured, dark brown-haired girl wearing glasses who looks apologetically owl-like (see "Scops Owl," Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th éd.). I am paninied between (starting in the lower right-hand corner and continuing clockwise): Lewis "Albino" Polk, who would soon be suspended for bringing a handgun to Pre-Algebra; Josh Stetmeyer, whose older brother, Beet, was arrested for dealing LSD to eighth graders; Howie Easton, who went through girls the way a deer hunter in a single day of shooting could go through hun-

VISUAL AID 2.O

28 MARISHA PESSL

VISUAL AID 2 . 1

dreds of rounds of ammunition (some claimed his list of conquests included our art teacher, Mrs. Appleton); John Sato, whose breath always smelled like an oil rig; and the much ridiculed, six-foot-three Sara Marshall who, only a few days after this class photo was taken, left Clearwood Day, supposedly to go revolutionize German women's basketball in Berlin. ("You're the spitting image of your mother," Dad commented when first observing this photo. "You have her prima ballerina grit and grace—a quality all the plains and uglies of the world would kill for.") I have blue eyes, freckles and stand approximately five-foot-three in socks. I should also mention that Dad, despite having received embarrassing marks from the Bridges on both his Technical and Freestyle programs, had that brand of good looks which only reach full force at the onset of middle age. As you can see, while at the University of Lausanne, Dad's look was uncertain and squinty—his hair too angrily blond, his skin too severely fair, his large frame uneven and indecisive (Visual Aid 2.1). (Dad's eyes are considered

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 29 hazel, but during this period, simple "haze" was a more fitting description.) Over the years, however (and due in a large part to the African kilnlike conditions), Dad had hardened nicely into one with a coarse, slightly ruined appearance (Visual Aid 2.2). This made him the target, the lighthouse, the \ightbulb, of many women across the country, particularly in the over thirtyfive age group. Dad picked up women the way certain wool pants can't help but pick up lint. For years I had a nickname for them, though I feel a little guilty using it now: June Bugs (see "Figeater Beetle," Ordinary Insects, Vol. 24). There was Mona Letrovski, the actress from Chicago with wide-set eyes and dark hair on her arms who liked to shout, "Gareth, you're a fool," with her back to him, Dad's cue to run over to her, turn her around and see the Look of Bitter Longing on her face. Only Dad never turned her around to see the Bitter Longing. Instead, he stared at her back as if it was an abstract painting. Then he went into the kitchen for a glass of bourbon. There was Connie Madison Parker, whose perfume hung in the air like a battered pifiata. There was Zula Pierce of Okush, New Mexico, a black woman who was taller

gVM VISUAL AID 2 . 2

30 UAKVoWÂ PESSL than he was, so whenever Dad kissed her she had to bend down as if peeking through a peephole to see who was ringing her bell. She started out calling me, "Blue, honey," which, like her relationship with Dad, slowly began to erode, becoming "Bluehoney" and then "Blueoney," ultimately ending with "Baloney." ("Baloney had it in for me from the very beginning!" she screamed.) Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days). I admit sometimes I hated them, especially the ones teeming with Ladies' Tips, How-tos and Ways to Improve, the ones like Connie Madison Parker, who muscled her way into my bathroom and chastised me for hiding my merchandise (see "Molluscs," Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th éd.). Connie Madison Parker, age 36, on Merchandise: "You got to put your goods on display, babe. Otherwise, not only will the boys ignore you but—an' trust me on this, my sister's flat as you—we're talkin' the Great Plains of East Texas—no landmarks—one day you'll look down and have no wares at all. What'll you do then?" Sometimes June Bugs weren't too terrible. Some of the sweeter, more docile ones like poor, droopy-eyed Tally Meyerson, I actually felt sorry for, because even though Dad made no attempt to hide the fact they were as temporary as Scotch tape, most were blind to his indifference (see "Basset Hound," Dictionary of Dogs, Vol. 1). Perhaps the June Bug understood Dad had felt that way about all the others, but armed with three decades' worth of Ladies Home Journal editorials, an expertise in such publications as Getting Him to the Altar (Trask, 1990) and The Chill Factor: How Not to Give a Damn (and Leave Him Wanting More) (Mars, 2000) as well as her own personal history of soured relationships, most of them believed (with the sort of unyielding insistence associated with religious fanatics) that, when under the spell of her burnt-sugar aura, Dad wouldn't feel that way about her. Within a few fun-filled dates, Dad would learn how intoxicating she was in the kitchen, what an Old Sport she was in the bedroom, how enjoyable during carpools. And so it always came as a complete surprise when Dad turned out the lights, swatted her ruthlessly off his screen, and subsequently drenched his entire porch in Raid Pest Control. Dad and I were like the trade winds, blowing through town, bringing dry weather wherever we went.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 31 Sometimes the June Bugs tried to stop us, foolishly believing they could reroute a Global Wind and permanently impact the world's weather system. Two days before we were scheduled to move to Harpsberg, Connecticut, Jessie Rose Rubiman of Newton, Texas, heiress to the Rubiman Carpeting franchise, announced to Dad she was pregnant with his child. She tearfully demanded she move with us to Harpsberg or Dad would have to pay a Onetime Initiation Fee of $100,000 with an ongoing direct debit of $10,000 per month for the next eighteen years. Dad didn't panic. When it came to such matters, he prided himself with having the air of a maître d' in a restaurant with an exorbitant wine list, preordered soufflé, and roving cheese cart. He calmly asked for confirmation with blood. As it turned out, Jessie wasn't pregnant. She had an exotic strain of stomach flu, which she'd eagerly confused with morning sickness. While we prepared for Harpsberg, now a week behind schedule, Jessie performed sad, sobbing monologues into our answering machine. The day we left, Dad found an envelope on the porch in front of the front door. He tried to hide it from me. "Our last utilities bill," he said, because he'd rather die than show me the "hormonal ravings of a madwoman," which he himself had inspired. Six hours later, however, somewhere in Missouri, I stole the letter from the glove compartment when he stopped at a gas station to buy Turns. Dad found love letters from a June Bug as monumental as an extraction of aluminum, but for me it was like coming across a vein of gold in quartz. Nowhere in the world was there a nugget of emotion more absolute. I still have my collection, which tallies seventeen. I include below an excerpt from Jessie's four-page Ode to Gareth: You mean the very world to me and I'd go to the ends of the earth for you if you asked me. You didn't ask me though and I will accept that as a friend. I will miss you. I'm sorry about that baby thing. I hope we keep in touch and that you will consider me a good friend in the future who you can relie on in thickness and thin. In lou of yesterday's phone call I am sorry I called you a pig. Gareth all I ask is to remember me not as I have been over the past couple days but as that happy woman you met in the parking lot of K-Mart. Peace be to you forever more.

32 UAKVoU PESSL Most of the time, though, despite the occasional buzzing sounds reverberating through a quiet evening, it was always Dad and me, the way it was always George and Martha, Butch and Sundance, Fred and Ginger, Mary and Percy Bysshe. On your average Friday night in Roman, New Jersey, you wouldn't find me in the darkened corner of the parking lot of Sunset Cinemas with the Tanned Sporto with Shiny Legs, puffing on American Spirits waiting for the Spoiled Pretender (in his father's car) so we could speed down Atlantic Avenue, scale the chain-link fence surrounding long-out-of-business African Safari Minigolf, and drink lukewarm Budweiser on the tatty Astroturf of Hole 10. Nor would you find me in the back of Burger King holding sweaty hands with the Kid Whose Mouthful of Braces Made Him Look Simian, or at a sleepover with the Goody Two-Shoes Whose Uptight Parents, Ted and Sue, Wished to Prevent Her Ascent into Adulthood as if It Were the Mumps and certainly not with the Cools or the Trendies. You'd find me with Dad. We'd be in a rented two-bedroom house on an unremarkable street lined with bird mailboxes and oak trees. We'd be eating overcooked spaghetti covered in the sawdust of parmesan cheese, either reading books, grading papers or watching such classics as North by Northwest or Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, after which, when I was finished with the dishes (and only if he'd sunk into a Bourbon Mood), Dad could be entreated to perform his impression of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone. Sometimes, if he was feeling especially inspired, he'd even stick a piece of paper towel into his gums to re-create Vito's mature bulldog look. (Dad always pretended I was Michael.): Barzini will move against you first. He'll set up a meeting with someone you absolutely trust, guaranteeing your safety. And at that meeting you'll be assassinated . . . it's an old habit. I've spent my entire life trying not to be careless. Dad said "careless" regretfully, and stared at his shoes. Women and children can be careless, but not men . . . Now listen. Dad raised his eyebrows and stared at me.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 33 Whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting, he's the traitor. Don't ever forget that. This was the moment for my only line in the scene. Grazie, Pop. Here Dad nodded and closed his eyes. Prego. On one particular occasion however, when I was eleven in Futtoch, Nebraska, I remember quite distinctly I didn't laugh at Dad doing Brando doing Vito. We were in the living room, and as he spoke, he happened to move directly over a desk lamp with a red lampshade; and suddenly, the crimson light Halloweened his face—ghosting his eyes, witching his mouth, beasting his jaw so his cheeks resembled a withered tree trunk into which some kid could crudely carve his initials. He was no longer my Dad, but someone else, something else —a terrifying, red-faced stranger bearing his dark, moldy soul in front of the worn velvet reading chair, the slanted bookshelf, the framed photograph of my mother with her bourgeois belongings. "Sweet?" Her eyes were alive. She stared at his back, her gaze mournful, as if she were an old woman in a nursing home who pondered and probably answered every one of Life's Great Questions, but nobody took her seriously in those sticky rooms of Jeopardy!, pet therapy and Makeup Hour for Ladies. Dad, directly in front of her, stared at me, his shoulders seesawed. He looked uncertain, as if I'd just entered the room and he wasn't sure if I'd seen him stealing. "What is it?" He stepped toward me, his face again soaked in the harmless yellow light of the rest of the room. "I have a stomachache," I said abruptly, and then turned, ran upstairs to my room and pulled from the shelf an old paperback, Souls for Sale: Unveiling John Doe Sociopath (Burne, 1991). Dad himself had picked it up for me at some psychology professor's pre-retirement garage sale. I actually flipped through all of Chapter 2, "Character Sketch: A Lack of Connection in Romantic Relationships," and parts of Chapter 3, "Two Missing Pieces: Scruples and a Conscience," before I realized how hysterical and foolish I was. While

34 MÀR1SHÀ PESSL it was true that Dad displayed a "marked disregard for others' feelings" (p. 24), could "charm the pants off people" (p. 29), and wasn't "concerned with the moral codes of society" (p. 5), he did "love things other than himself" (p. 81) or the "splendid sage he saw whenever he regarded himself in the bathroom mirror" (p. 109): my mother and, of course, me.

mnceton professor and leading sociologist Dr. Fellini Loggia made the somewhat gloomy statement in The Imminent Future (1978) that nothing in life is authentically astonishing, "not even being struck by lightning" (p. 12). "A person's life," he writes, "is nothing more than a series of tip-offs of what's to come. If we had the brains to notice these clues, we might be able to change our futures." Well, if my life had a hint, a whisper, a cute, well-placed clue, it was when I was thirteen and Dad and I moved to Howard, Louisiana. While my nomadic life with Dad might sound daring and revolutionary to the outside observer, the reality was different. There is a disturbing (and wholly undocumented) Law of Motion involving an object traveling across an American interstate, the sense that, even though one is careening madly forward, nothing is actually happening. To one's infinite disappointment, one always arrives at Point B with energy and all physical characteristics wholly unchanged. Every now and then, at night, before I fell asleep, I found myself staring at the ceiling, praying for something real to happen, something that would transform me—and God always took on the personality of the ceiling at which I was staring. If the ceiling was imprinted with moonlight and leaves from the window, He was glamorous and poetic. If there was a slight tilt, He was inclined to listen. If there was a faint water stain in the corner, He'd weathered many a storm and would weather mine too. If there was a smear cutting through the center by the overhead lamp where something with six or eight legs had been exterminated via newspaper or shoe, He was vengeful. When we moved to Howard, God answered my prayers. (He turned out to be smooth and white, otherwise, surprisingly unremarkable.) On the long,

36 MÀR1SHA PESSL dry drive through Nevada's Andamo Desert, listening to a book-on-tape, Dame Elizabeth Gliblett reading in her grand ballroom of a voice The Secret Garden (Burnett, 1909), I offhandedly mentioned to Dad that none of the houses we rented ever had a decent yard, and so, the following September when we arrived in Howard, Dad chose 120 Gildacre Street, a worried house of pale blue stranded in the middle of a tropical biosphere. While the rest of Gildacre Street cultivated prim peonies, dutiful roses, placid yards plagued only by the rare clump of crabgrass, Dad and I fought escalating plant life indigenous to the Amazon Basin. Every Saturday and Sunday for three weeks, armed with nothing but pruning shears, leather gloves and Off, Dad and I rose early and trekked deep into our rain forest in a heroic attempt to scale back the growth. We'd rarely last two hours, sometimes less than twenty minutes if Dad happened to spot what was allegedly a Stag Beetle the size of his foot scuttling under the leaves of a talipot palm (men's size 12). Never one to admit defeat, Dad attempted to rally the troops with "Nothing defeats the Van Meers!" and "You think if Patton lived here, he'd throw in the towel?" until that fateful morning he was mysteriously bitten by something ("Ahhhhhhh!" I heard him cry from the front porch where I was trying to curtail knotted liana.) His left arm inflated to the size of a football. That evening, Dad answered an advertisement of an experienced gardener in The Howard Sentinel. "Yardwork," it read. "Anyhow. Anywhere. I do." His name was Andreo Verduga, and he was the most beautiful creature I'd ever seen (see "Panther," Glorious Predators of the Natural World, Goodwin, 1987). He was tan, with black hair, gypsy eyes and, from what I could deduce from my upstairs bedroom window, a torso smooth as a river rock. He was from Peru. He wore heavy cologne and spoke in the language of an oldfashioned telegram. HOW YOU DO STOP NICE DAY STOP WHERE IS HOSE STOP Every Monday and Thursday at four o'clock, I'd procrastinate working on my French compositions or Algebra III and spy on him working, though most of the time he didn't work so much as hang out, chill, loiter, loaf, enjoy a laid-back cigarette in a scarce patch of sun. (He always threw the stub in a clandestine place, tossing it behind a bromeliad or into a dense section of bamboo without even making sure it was extinguished.) Andreo really only started working two to three hours after his arrival, when Dad came home from the university. With an array of showy gestures (heavy panting, wiping

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 37 his brow), he'd then push the lawnmower ineffectively along the forest floor, or prop up the wooden stepladder on the side of the house in a futile attempt to hack back the canopy. My favorite observation was when Andreo muttered to himself in Spanish after Dad confronted him, demanding to know exactly why the knotted liana was still creating a Greenhouse Effect on the back porch, or why a brand new crop of strangler figs now lined the back of our property. One afternoon I made sure I was in the kitchen when Andreo slipped inside to steal one of my orange push pops from the freezer. He looked at me shyly and then smiled, revealing crooked teeth. YOU DON'T MIND STOP I EAT STOP BAD BACK STOP In the Howard Country Day library during lunch, I consulted Spanish textbooks and dictionaries and taught myself what I could. Me llamo Azul. My name is Blue. El jardinero, Mellors, es una persona muy curiosa. The gamekeeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person. iQuiere usted seducirme? rave

ad said he'd first heard about the St. Gallway School from a fellow proIfessor at Hicksburg State College, and for at least a year or so, a copy of the school's shiny 2001-2004 admissions catalogue, breathlessly entitled Higher Learning, Higher Grounds, had been riding around in a box in the back of our Volvo (along with five copies of Federal Forum, Vol. 10, Issue 5, 1998, featuring Dad's essay, "Nâchtlich: Popular Myths of Freedom Fighting"). The catalogue featured the proverbial wound-up rhetoric drenched in adjectives, sunny photos filled with bushy autumn trees, teachers with the kind faces of mice and kids grinning as they strolled down the sidewalk holding big textbooks in their arms like roses. In the distance, looking on (and apparently bored stiff) sat a crowd of glum plum mountains, a sky in wistful blue. "Our facilities leave nothing to be desired," moaned p. 14, and sure, there were football fields so smooth they looked like linoleum, a cafeteria with bay windows and wrought-iron chandeliers, a monster athletic complex that resembled the Pentagon. A diminutive stone chapel did its best to hide from the massive Tudor buildings slouched all over the lawns, structures christened with names like Hanover Hall, Elton House, Barrow and Vauxhall, each sporting a façade that brought to mind early U.S. presidents: graytopped, heavy brow, wooden teeth, mulish bearing. The booklet also featured a delightfully eccentric blurb about Horatio Mills Gallway, a rags-to-riches paper industrialist who'd founded the school back in 1910, not in the name of altruistic principles like civic duty or the persistence of scholarship, but for a megalomaniacal desire to see Saint in front

62 MARISHA PESSL of his surname; establishing a private school proved to be the easiest way to achieve this. My favorite section was "Where Have All the Gallwanians Gone?" which featured a proud blurb written by the Headmaster, Bill Havermeyer (a big old Robert Mitchum type), then went on to summarize the unparalleled achievements of Gallwanian alumni. Rather than the typical boasts of most puffed-up private schools—stratospheric SAT scores, the vast number of seniors who vaulted into the Ivy League—St. Gallway touted other, more extraordinary achievements: "We have the highest number of graduates in the country who go on to be revolutionary performance artists;. . . 7.27 percent of all Gallway graduates in the last fifty years have registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; one out of every ten Gallway students becomes an inventor; . . .24.3 percent of all Gallwanians become published poets; 10 percent will study stage-makeup design; 1.2 percent puppetry;. . . 17.2 percent will reside in Florence at some point; 1.8 percent in Moscow; 0.2 percent in Taipei." "One out of every 2,031 Gallwanians gets into The Guinness Book of World Records. Wan Young, Class of 1982, holds the record for Longest Operatic Note Held . . ." As Dad and I sped down the school's main road for the first time (the aptly named Horatio Way, a narrow drive that teased you through a forest of pin-thin pines before abandoning you at the center of campus), I found myself holding my breath, inexplicably awed. To our immediate left tumbled a lawn of Renoir green, which pitched and swelled so excitedly, it appeared as if it might float away had it not been for the oak trees nailing it to the ground ("The Commons," sang the catalogue, "a lawn expertly cultivated by our ingenious caretaker, Quasimodo, who some say is the original Gallwanian . .."). To our right, chunky and impassive, was Hanover Hall, poised to cross the Delaware under icy conditions. Beyond a square stone courtyard ringed with birch trees, sat an elegant auditorium of glass and steel, colossal yet chic: Love Auditorium. Our intentions were strictly business. Dad and I had come, not only to take a campus tour with Admissions guru Mirtha Grazeley (an elderly woman in fuchsia silk who led us like an old moth in dazed zigzags across the grounds: "Eh, we haven't seen the art gallery have we? Oh dear, the cafeteria slipped my mind. And that horse weathervane on top of Elton, not sure if you remember, it appeared in Southern Architecture Monthly last year.") but also to ingratiate ourselves with the administrator in charge of translating the credits from my last school into the St. Gallway Grading

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 63 System and hence, determining my class rank. Dad approached this task with the seriousness of Reagan approaching Gorbachev with the Nuclear Forces Treaty. "Let me do the talking. You sit and look erudite." Our target, Ms. Lacey Ronin-Smith, was tucked away in the Rapunzellike clock tower of Hanover. She was sinewy, salt voiced, and unequivocally dreary haired. Now in her late sixties, she'd served as St. Gallway Academic Chancellor for the past thirty-one years, and, according to the photographs on display around her desk, was keen on quilting, nature hikes with her lady friends and a lapdog sporting more greasy black hair than an aged rock star. "What you have in your hands is an official copy of Blue's high school transcript," Dad was saying. "Yes," said Ms. Ronin-Smith. Her thin lips, which even in repose tended to look as if she were sucking on a lime, trembled slightly at the corners, hinting at vague dismay. "The school Blue is coming from —Lamego High in Lamego, Ohio—is one of the most dynamic schools in the country. I want to make sure her work is adequately recognized here." "Of course you do," said Ronin-Smith. "Naturally, students will be threatened by her, especially those who anticipate they'll be first or second in the class. We don't wish to upset anyone. However, it's only fair that she is placed in close proximity to where she was when my work forced us to relocate. She was number one—" Lacey gave Dad the Bureaucratic Stare—regret, with a hint of triumph. "I hate to discourage you, Mr. Van Meer, but I must inform you, Gallway policy is very clear in these matters. An incoming student, no matter how outstanding his or her marks, can not be placed higher than — " "Good God," Dad said abruptly. Eyebrows raised, mouth an enraptured smile, he was leaning forward in his seat the precise angle of the Tower of Pisa. I realized, in horror, he was pulling his Yes-Virginia-There-Is-a-SantaClaus face. I wanted to hide under my chair. "That is a very impressive diploma you have there. May I ask what it is?" "Eh—what?" squeaked Ronin-Smith (as if Dad had just pointed out a centipede inching along the wall behind her), and she swiveled around to survey the giant, gold-sealed, cream, calligraffitied diploma mounted next to a photo of the Môtley Crue dog in a bowtie and top hat. "Oh. That's my N.C. certificate for Distinguished Academic Counseling and Arbitration." Dad gasped a little. "Sounds like they could use you at the U.N."

64 MAR1SHA PESSL "Oh, please," said Ms. Ronin-Smith, shaking her head, reluctantly breaking into a small yellowed smile of rickrack teeth. A flush was starting to seep into her neck. "Hdrdly." Thirty minutes later, after Dad had sufficiently wooed her (he worked like a ferocious evangelist; one had no choice but to be saved), we descended the corkscrew stairs leading from her office. "Only one twerp ahead of you now," he whispered with unmitigated glee. "Some little tarantula named Radley Clifton. We've seen the type before. I surmise three weeks into Fall Term, you'll turn in one of your research papers on relativism and he'll go 'splat.' "

The following morning at 7:45, when Dad dropped me off in front of Hanover, I felt absurdly nervous. I had no idea why. I was as familiar with First Days of School as Jane Goodall her Tanzanian chimps after five years in the jungle. And yet, my linen blouse felt two sizes too big (the short sleeves creased off my shoulders like stiffly ironed dinner napkins), my red-and-white checkered skirt felt sticky and my hair (usually the one feature I could count on not to disgrace me) had opted to try a dried-dandelion frizz: I was a table in a bistro serving Bar-B-Q. " 'She walks in beauty, like the night,' " Dad shouted through the unrolled window as I climbed from the car. " 'Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that's best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes'! Knock them dead, kiddo! Teach them what educated means." I nodded weakly and slammed the door (ignoring the Fanta-haired woman who'd stopped on the steps and turned around for Dad-Dr. King's drop-off sermon). A campus-wide Morning Announcements was scheduled for 8:45, so after I found my locker on the third floor of Hanover, collected my books (throwing a friendly smile to the teacher frantically running in and out of her classroom with photocopies—the soldier who'd woken up to realize she had not sufficiently planned the day's offensive), I made my way outside along the sidewalk to Love Auditorium. I was still nerdily early, and the theater was empty apart from one diminutive kid in front trying to look absorbed in what was clearly a blank spiral notebook. The section for seniors was in the back. I sat down in my assigned seat, given to me by Ronin-Smith, and counted the minutes until the deafening student stampede, all the "What ups" and "How wuz your summers," the

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 65 smell of shampoo, toothpaste and new leather shoes, and that scary kinetic energy kids emitted whenever they were in large numbers so floors throbbed, walls buzzed and you thought if only you could figure out how to harness it, get it through a few parallel circuits and straight through a power station, you could safely and economically light up the East Coast. I'm obliged to reveal an old trick: implacable self-possession can be attained by all, not by pretending to look absorbed in what's clearly a blank spiral notebook; not by trying to convince yourself you're an undiscovered rock star, movie star, top model, tycoon, Bond, Bond Girl, Queen Elizabeth, Elizabeth Bennett or Eliza Doolittle at the Ambassador's Ball; not by imagining you're a long-lost member of the Vanderbilt family, nor by tilting up your chin fifteen to forty-five degrees and pretending to be Grace Kelly in her prime. These methods work in theory, but in practice they slip away, so one is left hideously naked with nothing but the stained sheet of self-confidence around one's feet. Instead, stately dignity can be possessed by all, in two ways: 1. Diverting the mind with a book or play 2. Reciting Keats I discovered this technique early in life, in second grade at Sparta Elementary. When I couldn't help but overhear details of Eleanor Slagg and Her Recent Exclusive Sleepover, I pulled a book out of my bag, Mein Kampf (Hitler, 1925), which I'd randomly stolen from Dad's library. I tucked my head between the hardback covers and, with the severity of the German Chancellor himself, made myself read and read until the words on the page invaded Eleanor's words and Eleanor's words surrendered.

"Welcome," said Headmaster Havermeyer into the microphone. Bill was built like a Saguaro cactus that had ultimately had gone too long without water, and his clothes—the navy jacket, blue shirt, the leather belt with a giant silver buckle portraying either the Siege of the Alamo or the Battle of Little Bighorn—looked as dried out, faded and dusty as his face did. He paced the stage, slowly, as if reveling in the imaginary clinks of his spurs; he held the cordless microphone lovingly: it was his high-crowned Stetson. "Here we go," whispered the hyperactive Mozart next to me who

66 UAKVoU PESSL wouldn't stop tapping out The Marriage of Figaro (1786) in the space of seat between his legs. I was next to Amadeus and some sad kid who was the spitting image of Sal Mineo (see Rebel Without a Cause). "For those of you who've never heard Dixon's Words of Wisdom," Bill went on, "those of you who're new, well, you're lucky 'cause you get to hear it for the first time. Dixon was my grandfather, Pa Havermeyer, and he liked young people who listened, who learned from their elders. When I was growing up he'd pull me aside and he'd say, 'Son, don't be afraid to change.' Well, I can't say it any better. Don't be afraid to change. That's right." He certainly wasn't the first headmaster to suffer from the Ol'-Blue-Eyesat-The-Sands Effect. Countless headmasters, particularly male, confused the slick floors of a dimly lit cafeteria or the muddled acoustics of a high school auditorium for the ruby-walled Copa Room, mistook students for a doting public who'd made their reservations months in advance and shelled out $100 a pop. Tragically, he believed he could sing "Strangers in the Night" offkey, croon "The Best Is Yet to Come," lose a strand of the lyrics and never mar his reputation as Chairman of the Board, The Voice, Swoonatra. In truth, of course, he was being ridiculed, mocked and mimicked. "Hey, what're you reading?" a boy asked behind me. I did not think the words were directed at me until they were repeated very close to my right shoulder. I stared down at the worn-out play in my hand, p. 18. Do ya make Brick happy? "Hello, miss? Ma'am?" He leaned even closer, leaving breath-hotness on my neck. "You speak English?" A girl next to him giggled. "Parlay vu fronsai? Sprekenzee doyche?" According to Dad, in every circumstance when it was difficult to flee, there was what he called The Oscar Shapeley, a man of great repugnance who'd mysteriously come to the conclusion that what he had to offer in the way of conversation was intensely fascinating and what he had to offer in the way of sex was wholly irresistible. "Parlate Italiano? Hello?" The dialogue in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams, 1955) trembled before my eyes. "One of those no-neck monsters hit me with some ice cream. Their fat little heads sit on their fat little necks without a bit of connection . . ." Maggie the Cat wouldn't withstand such harassment. She'd cross her legs in her flimsy slip and say something passionate and shrill and everyone in the

SPECIAL TOPICS IK CALAMITY PHYSICS 67 room, including Big Daddy, would choke on the ice they were chewing from their mint juleps. "What's a guy gotta do to get a little attention around here?" I had no choice but to turn around. "What?" He was smiling at me. I expected him to be a no-neck monster, but to my shock, he was a Goodnight Moon (Brown, 1947). Goodnight Moons had duvet eyes, shadowy eyelids, a smile like a hammock and a silvered, sleepy countenance that most people wore only during the few minutes prior to sleep, but which the Goodnight Moon sported all day and well into the evening. Goodnight Moons could be male or female and were universally adored. Even teachers worshiped them. They looked to Goodnight Moons whenever they asked a question and even though they answered with a drowsy, wholly incorrect answer, the teacher would say, "Oh, wonderful," and twist the words around like a thin piece of wire until they resembled something glorious. "Sorry," he said. "Didn't mean to disturb you." He had blond hair, but he wasn't the sort of washed-out Scandinavian blond person who desperately looked as if he needed to be dyed, tinted, hand dipped in something. He wore a crisp white shirt, a navy blazer. His red-andblue striped tie was loose and slightly askew. "So what are you, a famous actress? Headed to Broadway?" "Oh, no—" "I'm Charles Loren," he said, as if revealing a secret. Dad was a devotee of Sturdy Eye Contact, but what Dad never addressed was that staring directly into a person's eyes was nearly impossible at close range. You had to choose an eye, right or left, or veer back and forth between the two, or simply settle for the spot between the eyes. But I'd always thought that was a sad, vulnerable spot, unkempt of eyebrow and strange of tilt, where David had aimed his stone at Goliath and killed him. "I know who you are," he said. "Blue something. Don't tell me — " "What on earth is that hubbub in the back there?" Charles jerked back in his seat. I turned. A stocky woman with sour orange hair—the same person who'd glowered at Dad shouting Byron when he dropped me off—had replaced Havermeyer on the auditorium stage. Wearing a turnip-pink suit that strained like a weight lifter to remain buttoned, she stared up at me with her arms crossed and legs

68 UÂKVoU PESSL planted firmly apart resembling Diagram 11.23, "Classic Turkish Warrior during the Second Crusade" in one of Dad's favorite texts, For the Love of God: History of Religious War and Persecution (Murgg, 1981). And she wasn't the only one staring. All sound had been sucked out of Love Auditorium. Heads were turned toward me like a troop of Seljuk Turks noticing a lone, unwitting Christian taking a shortcut through their camp on his way to Jerusalem. "You must be a new student," she said into the microphone. Her voice sounded like amplified heel scuffs along pavement. "Allow me to let you in on a little secret. What's your name?" I hoped it was a figurative question, one I might not be expected to answer, but she was waiting. "Blue," I said. She made a face. "What? What did she say?" "She said blue," someone said. "Blue? Well, Blue, at this school, when people take the stage, we give them the respect they deserve. We pay attention." Perhaps I need not point out that I was not accustomed to being stared at, not by an entire school. The Jane Goodall was accustomed to doing all the staring, always in solitude and always from a location of dense foliage, which made her in her khaki shorts and linen blouse virtually indistinguishable from the bamboo canopy. My heart stuttered as I stared back at all the eyes. Slowly, they began to peel off me like eggs on a wall. "As I was saying. There are critical changes in the Add-Drop Deadlines and I will not make exceptions for anyone. I don't care how many Godiva chocolates you bring me —I'm talking to you, Maxwell. I ask you be on time when you make decisions about coursework, and I mean it." "Sorry about that," Charles whispered behind me. "I should've warned you. Eva Brewster, you want to lie low around her. Everyone calls her Evita. It's a bit of a dictator situation. Technically, though, she's only a secretary." The woman —Eva Brewster—dismissed the school to class. "Now listen, I wanted to ask you something—hey, wait a sec — !" I darted past Mozart, pushing my way to the end of the row and into the aisle. Charles managed to keep up with me. "Hold on." He smiled. "Dang, you're really gung ho about classes— typical A personality, sheesh—but, uh, seeing how you're brand new, a few of my friends and I were hoping . . ." He was apparently talking to me, but his eyes were already floating up the stairs to the EXIT. Goodnight Moons all had heliumed eyes. They could never be tied to anyone for long. "We were hoping

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 69 you'd have lunch with us. We snagged a pass to go off campus. So don't go to the cafeteria. Meet us at the Scratch. 12:15." He l e a n ed in, his face inches from mine: "And don't be late, or there'll be serious consequences. Understand?" He winked and dashed away. I stood for a moment in the aisle, unable to move until kids started pushing against my backpack and I was forced up the stairs. I had no idea how Charles knew my name. I did, however, know exactly why he'd rolled out the red carpet: he and his friends were hoping I'd join their Study Group. I'd toiled through a long history of Study Group invites extended by everyone from the Almond-Eyed Football Hero Who'd Have a Son by Senior Year to the Rita Hayworth Sunday Newspaper Coupon Model. I used to be thrilled when I was asked to join a Study Group, and when I arrived at the designated living room equipped with note cards, highlighters, red pens, and supplemental textbooks, I was euphoric as any Chorus Girl who'd been asked to understudy the Lead. Even Dad was excited. As he drove me to Brad's, or Jeb's or Sheena's, he'd start muttering about this being a wonderful opportunity, one that would allow me to spread my Dorothy Parker wings and singlehandedly spearhead a contemporary Algonquin Round Table. Once he dropped me off, though, it didn't take long to realize I hadn't been invited for my scathing wit. If Carla's living room was the Vicious Circle, I was the waiter everyone ignored unless they wanted another scotch or there was something wrong with the food. Somehow, one of them had discovered I was a "geek" (a "cardigan" at Coventry Academy), and I'd be assigned to research one out of every two questions on the Study Sheet, sometimes the entire Study Sheet. "Let her do that one, too. You don't mind do you, Blues?" The turning point came at Leroy's. Right in the middle of his living room crowded with porcelain Dalmatian miniatures, I started to cry—though I didn't know why I decided to cry on that particular occasion; Leroy, Jessica and Schyler had only assigned me one out of every four questions on the Study Sheet. They began to chant in high-pitched, saccharine voices, "Oh, my God, what's wrong?" causing the three live Dalmatians to run into the living room, circling and barking, and Leroy's mother emerged from the kitchen wearing pink dishwashing gloves shouting, "Leroy, I told you not to egg them on!" I ran out of the house, all the way home, about six miles. Leroy never returned my supplemental textbooks. "So how do you know Charles?" asked Sal Mineo next to me as we reached the glass doors.

70 MARim PESSL "I don't know Charles," I said. "Well, you're lucky because everyone wants to know him." "Why?" Sal looked troubled, then shrugged and said in a soft, regretful voice: "He's royalty." Before I could ask what that meant, he skipped down the cement steps and disappeared into the crowd. Sal Mineos were always talking in spongy voices and making comments that were as vague as the outline of an angora sweater. Their eyes weren't like everyone else's but had enlarged tear glands and extra optic nerves. I thought about hurrying after him, letting him know by the end of the movie he'd be acknowledged as a character of great sensitivity and pathos, an archetype of all that was lost and injured about his generation, but would be gunned down by trigger-happy police if he wasn't careful, if he didn't come to an understanding about himself and who he was. Instead, I'd spotted the royal: Prince Charles, backpack slung over his shoulder, a playful grin, was striding quickly across the courtyard toward a tall, dark-haired girl wearing a long brown wool coat. He snuck up behind her, threw his arm around her neck with an "Ah-haahhhh!" She shrieked, and then, when he jumped in front of her, laughed. It was one of those chime-laughs that knifed cleanly through the morning, through the tired muttering of all the other kids, hinting this person had never known embarrassment or awkwardness, that even her grief would be gorgeous in the off chance she ever experienced it. Obviously, this was his dazzling girlfriend, and they were one of those tan, hair-tossing Blue Lagoon couples (one per every high school) who threatened to destroy the bedrock of the chaste educational community simply by the muggy way they looked at each other in the halls. Students observed them with wonder, like they were fast-sprouting pinto beans in a clammy covered aquarium. Teachers —not all, but some—stayed awake all night hating them, because of their weird grown-up youth, which was like gardenias blooming in January, and their beauty, which was both stunning and sad as racehorses, and their love everyone except them knew wouldn't last. I deliberately stopped staring (you'd seen one version of Blue Lagoon, you'd seen them all), but when I'd walked to Hanover and pulled open the side door, I nonchalantly glanced back in their direction and realized with shock, I'd made a major blunder in observation. Charles now stood at a respectful distance (though the look on his face was still like a kitten staring at string) and she was talking to him with a

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 71 teacherly frown (a frown all decent teachers mastered; Dad had one that instantly turned his forehead into rippled potato chips). She wasn't a student. In fact, I had no idea how I, given that stance, could possibly have mistaken her for one. A hand on her hip, chin tilted as if trying to make out a falcon circling above the Commons, she wore brown leather boots that resembled Italy and dug the heel of one into the pavement, grinding out an invisible cigarette. It was Hannah Schneider.

When Dad was in a Bourbon Mood, he'd make a five-minute toast to old Benno Ohnesorg, shot by Berlin police at a student rally in 1967. Dad, nineteen years old, was next to him: "He was standing on my shoelace when he went down. And my life—asinine things I'd wasted time worrying about—my marks, my standing, my girl—it all congealed when I looked into his dead eyes." Here, Dad fell silent and sighed (though it wasn't so much a sigh as a Herculean exhale one could use to play a bagpipe). I could smell the alcohol, a strange hot smell, and when I was little I guessed it was what the Romantic poets smelled of, or those nineteenth-century Latin generals Dad enjoyed talking about who "surfed in and out of power on waves of revolution and resistance juntas." "And that was my Bolshevik moment, so to speak," he said. "When I decided to storm the Winter Palace. If you're lucky, you'll have one." And every now and then, after Benno, Dad might go on to expound upon one of his most beloved principles, that of the Life Story, but only if he didn't have a lecture to compose, or wasn't midway through a chapter in a new book on war written by someone he'd known at Harvard. (He'd dissect it like a gung-ho coroner hoping to find evidence of foul play: "Here it is, sweet! Evidence Lou Swann's a hack! Counterfeit! Listen to this dung! 'In order to be successful, revolutions require a highly visible armed force to unleash widespread panic; this violence must then gain momentum, escalating into out-and-out civil war.' Fool wouldn't know civil war if it bit him on the ass!") "Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story," Dad said, scratching his jaw thoughtfully, arranging the limp collar of his chambray shirt. "Even if you have your Magnificent Reason, it could still be dull as Nebraska and that's no one's fault but your own. Well, if you feel it's miles of cornfields, find something to believe in other than yourself, preferably

72 UAKVoWÂ PESSL a cause without the stench of hypocrisy, and then charge into battle. There's a reason they still put Che Guevara on T-shirts, why people still whisper about The Nightwatchmen when there's been no evidence of their existence for twenty years. "But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don't care what those themes are—they're yours to uncover and stand behind—so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts. Mut, in German. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last." "How do you know?" I always asked, and when I spoke it sounded tiny and uncertain, compared to Dad. "I just know," he said simply, and then closed his eyes, which indicated that he didn't want to talk anymore. The only sound in the room was the ice melting his glass.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

fr nowing that Charles was on familiar terms with Hannah Schneider * tempted me a little, but in the end I decided not to meet him at the I Scratch. I didn't have a clue what the Scratch was and didn't have time to care. I was, after all, weighed down with six AP courses ("Enough to sink a fleet of USS Anythings," Dad said) and only a single free period. My professors had shown themselves to be sharp, methodical, altogether on the ball (not "entirely in the outhouse," as Dad described Mrs. Roper of Meadowbrook Middle who boldly brought a grand finale to her every sentence with a preposition: "Where's your copy of The Aeneid at?"). Most of them had perfectly respectable vocabularies (Ms. Simpson of AP Physics used ersatz within fifteen minutes of the bell) and one, namely Ms. Martine Filobeque of AP French, had Permanently Pursed Lips, which could present a serious threat as the year unfolded. "The enduring pursed lip, a trait associated exclusively with the female educator, is a sign of erratic academic anger," Dad said. "I'd think seriously about flowers, candy—anything to get yourself associated in her mind with all that's right in the world, rather than all that's wrong." My peers too—they were not exactly airheads or fools (pasta, as Dad called every kid at Sage Day). When I'd raised my hand in AP English to answer Ms. Simpson's question regarding Primary Themes in Invisible Man (Ellison, 1952) (which turned up on Summer Reading Lists with the regularity of corruption in Cameroon), incredibly, I wasn't quite fast enough; another kid, Radley Clifton, pudgy, with an eroded chin, already had his fat hand in the air. While his answer wasn't brilliant or inspired, it also wasn't crude or Calibanesque, and it dawned on me, as Ms. Simpson handed out a nineteen-page

74 UARVoU PESSL syllabus solely covering Fall Term, perhaps St. Gallway wouldn't be such Child's Play, such Easy Victory. Perhaps if I actually wanted to be Valedictorian (and I think I did, though sometimes What Dad Wanted blatantly made its way into What I Wanted without having to go through Customs), I'd have to launch an aggressive campaign with all the ferocity of Attila the Hun. "One is only eligible for Valedictorian once in one's life," Dad noted, "just as one only gets one body, one existence, and thus one shot at immortality."

I also didn't respond to the letter I received the next day, though I read it twenty times, even in the middle of Ms. Gershon's introductory AP Physics lecture, "From Cannonballs to Light Waves: The History of Physics." Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, when stumbling upon early hominid "Lucy" in 1974, probably felt the way I did when I opened my locker door and that cream envelope fell at my feet. I had no idea what I'd found: a wonder (that would forever change history) or a hoax.

Blue, What the heck happened?? You missed out on a nice broccoli cheddar baked potato at Wendy's. Guess you're playing hard to get. I'll play. Shall we try this again? You're filling me with longing. (Kidding.) Same place. Same time. Charles

I also ignored the two letters discovered in my locker the next day, Wednesday: the first in the cream envelope, the second written in pointy cursive on celery green paper emblazoned at the top with an elaborate tangle of initials: JCW.

Blue, I'm hurt. Well, I'll be there again today. Every day. Until the end of time. So give a guy a break already. Charles

SPECIAL TOPICS I I CALAMITY PHYSICS 75 Dear Blue, Charles has obviously made a mess of this situation, so I'm staging a family intervention. I'm assuming you think he's stalkerish. I don't blame you. The truth is, our friend Hannah told us about you and suggested we introduce ourselves. None of us have you in a class so we'll have to meet after school. This Friday at 3:45 go to the second floor of Barrow House, room 208, and wait for us there! Don't be late. We're DYING to meet you and hear all about Ohio!!! Kisses, Jade Churchill Whitestone

These letters would have charmed the average New Student. After a day or two of wordy resistance, like some silly eighteenth-century virgin, she'd tiptoe into the dark shadows of the Scratch, excitedly biting her cherry-plump bottom lip, and await Charles, the wigged aristocrat who'd carry her away (culottes flying) to ruin. I, on the other hand, was the implacable nun. I remained unmoved. Well, I'm exaggerating. I'd never received a letter from someone I didn't know (rather, never received a letter from someone who wasn't Dad) and there is an undeniable thrill when faced with a mysterious envelope. Dad once observed that personal letters (now alongside the Great Crested Newt on the Endangered Species list) were one of the few physical objects in this world that held magic within them: "Even the Dull and the Dim, those whose presences can barely be stomached in person, can be tolerated in a letter, even come off as mildly amusing." To me, there was something strange and insincere about their letters, something a little too "Madame de Merteuil to the Vicomte de Valmont at the Chateau de — ", a little too "Paris. 4 August 17—". Not that I thought I was the latest pawn in their game of seduction. I wouldn't go that far. But I knew all about knowing people and not knowing people. There was drudgery and danger in introducing a newcomer into that exclusive circle of belonging, le petit salon. Seating was limited, and thus it was inevitable someone old would have to move (a horrifying sign of losing one's foothold in the court, of turning into une grande dame manqué). To be safe, the newcomer was best ignored, if her background was obscure enough, shunned (coupled with insinuations of illegitimate birth),

76 UAKVoWA PESSL unless there was someone, a mother with a title, an influential aunt (affectionately called Madame Titi by all) who had the time and power to present the newcomer, to squeeze her in (never mind that everyone's birdcage wig knocked together) rearranging the others to positions which were comfortable, or at least bearable until the next revolution. Even more bizarre were the references to Hannah Schneider. She had no grounds to be my Madame Titi. I wondered if I'd come off at Surely Shoos as a particularly sad and despondent person. I thought I'd exuded "watchful intelligence," which was how Dad's colleague, hearing-impaired Dr. Ordinote described me when he came over for lamb chops one evening in Archer, Missouri. He complimented Dad on raising a young woman of "startling power and acumen." "If only everyone could have one of her, Gareth," he said, raising his eyebrows as he twisted the knob in his hearing aid. "The world would spin a little faster." There was the possibility that during her ten-minute exchange with Dad, Hannah Schneider had set her romantic sights on him and resolved that I, the quiet daughter, was the small, portable stepladder she'd use to reach him. Such had been the machinations of Sheila Crane of Pritchardsville, Georgia, who'd only encountered Dad for twenty seconds at the Court Elementary Art Show (she tore his ticket in half) before she decided he was Her Guy. After the Art Show, Miss Crane, who worked part-time at the Court Elementary Infirmary, had a habit of materializing during Break near the seesaws, calling out my name, holding up a box of Thin Mints. When I was in close proximity, she held out a cookie as if trying to tempt a stray dog. "Can you tell me a little more about your daddy? I mean," she said nonchalantly, though her eyes bored into me like an electrician's drill, "what kinda things duzzie like?" Usually I stared blankly at her, grabbed the Thin Mint and spirited away, but once I said, "Karl Marx." Her eyes widened in fear. "He's homosexshull?"

Revolution is slow burning, occurring only after decades of oppression and poverty, but the exact hour of its unleashing is often a moment of fateful mishap. According to one of Dad's little-known history texts, Les Faits Perdus (Manneurs, 1952), the Storming of the Bastille would never have happened,

SPECIAL TOPICS ]}{ CALAMITY PHYSICS 77 if one of the demonstrators outside the prison, a barley farmer by the name of Pierre Fromande, had not noticed a prison guard pointing at him and calling him un bricon ("fool"). On the morning of July 14, 1789, Pierre was on a short fuse. He'd had a fight with his voluptuous wife, Marie-Chantal, for her flirting sans scrupule with one of their field hands, Louis-Beige. Pierre, overhearing the insult, dimly aware the prison guard had the same chunky Roquefort torso of LouisBeige, lost all self-control and charged forward screaming, "C'est tout fini!" ("It's all over.") The frenzied crowd followed, believing he was speaking of the reign of Louis XVI, though Pierre was, in fact, referring to the image of Marie-Chantal screaming in pleasure in barley fields, Louis-Beige melting all over her. Yet, Pierre had misunderstood the well-meaning guard, who'd simply pointed at Pierre and shouted, "Votre bouton;" when dressing that morning, Pierre had missed the third button on his chemise. According to Manneurs, most of history has played out under similar circumstances, including the American Revolution (the Boston Tea Party was the work of 1777-era frat boys) and World War I (Gavrilo Princip, after a day with his drinking buddies, the Black Hands, fired a few rounds into the air, simply to show off, just as Archduke Ferdinand cruised by in his royal arcade) (p. 199, p. 243). Hiroshima was unintentional too. When Truman told his Cabinet, "I'm going in," he wasn't, as was believed, referring to a Japanese invasion, but giving voice to the simple desire to take a dip in the White House pool. My revolution was no less accidental. That Friday, a Know-Your-School Sorbet Social was held after lunch. Students mingled with teachers on the stone patio outside the Harper Racey '05 Cafeteria, feasting upon a selection of exclusive French sorbet, doled out by the Head Chef, Christian Gordon. Eager students (including Radley Clifton with his belly peeking out of his partially untucked shirt) swarmed around the key Gallway administrators (doubtlessly those in charge of end-ofyear honors; "Brown-nosing in this day and age backfires," Dad attested. "Networking, hobnobbing—it's all painfully out of season."). After saying modest helloes to a few of my teachers (smiling at Ms. Filobeque who stood rather forlornly under a hemlock, though in reply she only pursed her lips) I headed to my next class, AP Art History in Elton House, and waited in the empty classroom. After ten minutes, Mr. Archer appeared, carrying his tub of Mango sherbet and I'M EARTH FRIENDLY biodegradable satchel (see "Red-eyed Tree

78 MÂR1SHÀ PESSL Frog," The World of Ranidae: From Frog Princes to Tadpoles, Showa, 1998). He had so much sweat on his forehead he looked like a glass of iced tea. "Would you mind helping me set up the slide projector for the lecture?" he asked. (Mr. Archer being EARTH FRIENDLY was APPARATUS HOSTILE.) I agreed, and was just finishing loading the 112 slides, as the other students began to arrive, most of them with big, slurpy grins on their faces, tubs of sorbet in hand. "Thank you for your assistance, Babs," Mr. Archer said, smiling at me and affixing his long, sticky fingers to the top of his desk. "Today we finish up with Lascaux and turn to the rich artistic tradition that emerged in the area that is now southern Iraq. James, will you get the lights?" Unlike Pierre Fromande, I'd heard the man correctly. Unlike Truman's cabinet members, I'd understood his true meaning. Certainly, I'd been given aliases by teachers before, from Betsy and Barbara to "You in the Corner" and "Red, No, I'm Kidding." From years twelve to fourteen, I actually believed the name was cursed, that it was whispered among instructors "Blue" had the erratic properties of a ballpoint pen at high altitudes; if they uttered the name, a permanent blueness, dark and inexorable, could very well leak all over them. Lottie Bergoney, Instructor of the Second Grade in Pocus, Indiana, actually telephoned Dad and suggested he rechristen me. "You won't believe this!" Dad mouthed, cupping his hand over the receiver, gesturing for me to listen on the other line. "I'll be honest with you, Mr. Van Meer. The name's not healthy. The kids in class make fun of it. They call her navy. A few of the smart ones call her cobalt. And cordon bleu. Maybe you should think about alternatives." "Might you suggest some possibilities, Miss Bergie?" "Sure! I don't know about you, but I've always loved Daphne." Perhaps it was Mr. Archer's particular choice of name, Babs, the nickname of a restless wife wearing no bra during her tennis lesson. Or perhaps it was the confidence with which he said it, without a trace of uncertainty or second thought. Suddenly, at my desk, I couldn't breathe. At the same time, I wanted to leap from my chair and shout, "It's Blue, you sons of bitches!" Instead, I reached into my backpack and removed the three letters, still tucked into the cover of my assignment notebook. I reread each one, and then, with the same clarity that overtook Robespierre as he lounged in a bath

TOPICS IK CALAMITY PHYSICS 79 and liberté, égalité and fraternité sailed into his head—three great merchant ships coming into port—I knew what I had to do.

After class, I used the student payphone in Hanover to call Dad at the university. I left a message explaining I wouldn't need a ride home until 4:45; I was meeting with Ms. Simpson, my AP English teacher, to discuss her Great Expectations for research papers. At 3:40, after confirming in the Hanover ground-floor ladies room that I had sat on neither gum nor chocolate, that I had nothing in my teeth and had not accidentally pressed my inkstained hand against the side of my face leaving it a mosaic of black fingerprints (as I had once before), I walked, as composedly as I could, over to Barrow. I knocked on the door of 208 and was instantly greeted with a few flat, unsurprised voices: "It's open." Slowly, I opened the door. Four flour-pale kids sat at desks in a circle at the center of the classroom, none of them smiling. The other desks had been pushed to the walls. "Hi," I said. They stared at me sullenly. "I'm Blue." "You're here for the Dungeons & Dragons Demonology Guild," a kid pronounced in a squeaky voice like air being let out of a bicycle tire. "There's an extra player's handbook there. Right now we're choosing our roles for the year." "I'm Dungeon Master," clarified a kid quickly. "Jade?" I asked hopefully, turning to one of the girls. It wasn't a terrible guess: this one, wearing a long black dress with tight sleeves that ended in medieval Vs on top of her hands, had green hair that resembled dried spinach. "Lizzie," she said, narrowing her eyes suspiciously. "You know Hannah Schneider?" I asked. "The Film Studies teacher?" "What's she talking about?" the other girl asked the Dungeon Master. "Excuse me," I said. Holding onto my tight smile like some crazed Catholic her rosary, I backed out of Room 208, hurried back down the hall and stairs. In the aftermath of being brazenly hoodwinked or swindled, it's difficult

so

MAR1SHÀ PESSL

to accept, particularly if one has always prided oneself on being an intuitive and scorchingly observant person. Standing on the Hanover steps, waiting for Dad, I reread Jade Whitestone's letter fifteen times, convinced I'd missed something—the correct day, time or location to meet, or perhaps she'd made a mistake; perhaps she'd written the letter while watching On the Waterfront and had been distracted by the pathos of Brando picking up Eva Marie Saint's tiny white glove and slipping it onto his own meaty hand, but soon, of course, I realized her letter was teeming with sarcasm (particularly in the final sentence), which I hadn't originally picked up on. It had all been a hoax. Never had there been a rebellion more anticlimactic and second rate, except perhaps the "Gran Horizontes Tropicoco Uprising" in Havana in 1980, which, according to Dad, was composed of out-of-work big band musicians and El Loro Bonito chorus girls and lasted all of three minutes. ("Fourteenyear-old lovers last longer," he'd noted.) And the longer I sat on the steps, the cruddier I felt. I pretended not to stare enviously at the happy kids slinging themselves and their giant backpacks into their parents' cars, or the tall boys with untucked shirts rushing across the Commons, shouting at each other, cleats slung over their bony shoulders like tennis shoes over traffic wires. By 5:10 P.M. I was doing my AP Physics homework on my knees and there was no sign of Dad. The lawns, the roofs of Barrow and Elton, even the sidewalks, had tarnished in the fading light of Depression-era photographs, and apart from a few teachers making their way to the Faculty Parking Lot (coal miners plodding home) it was all quite sad and silent, except for the oak trees fanning themselves like bored Southerners, a coach whistle far off on the fields. "Blue?" To my horror, it was Hannah Schneider, descending the steps behind me. "What are you doing here at this hour?" "Oh," I said, smiling as joyously as I could. "My dad's running late at work." It was critical to appear happy and well loved; after school, teachers stared at kids unattended by parents like they were suspicious packages abandoned in an airport lounge. "You don't drive?" she asked, stopping next to me. "Not yet. I can drive. I just haven't gotten my license." (Dad didn't see the point: "What, so you can cruise around town for a year before you go off to college like a nurse shark lazing around a reef desperate for guppies? I

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 81 don't think so. Next thing I know you'll be wearing biker leather. Wouldn't you prefer, anyway, to be chauffeured?") Hannah nodded. She wore a long black skirt and a yellow button-down sweater. While most teachers' hair at the end of the day resembled crusty windowsill plants, Hannah's—dark, but rusting a little in the late-day lightposed provocatively around her shoulders like Lauren Bacall in a doorway. It was strange for a teacher to be so guiltily watchable, so addictive. She was Dynasty, As the World Turns; one felt something fantastically bitchy was about to happen. "Jade will have to swing by and pick you up then," she announced matter-of-factly. "It's just as well. The house is difficult to find. This Sunday. Twoish, two-thirty. You like Thai food?" (She didn't wait for my answer.) "Every Sunday I cook for them and you're the guest of honor from now until the end of the year. You'll get to know them. Gradually. They're wonderful kids. Charles is adorable and sweet, but the others can be difficult. Like most people they hate change, but everything good in life is an acquired taste. If they give you a hard time, remember it's not you —it's them. They'll just have to get over themselves." She gave one of those housewife commercial sighs (kid, carpet stain) and waved away an invisible fly. "How do you like your classes? Are you adjusting?" She spoke quickly and for some reason my heart was hitch-kicking excitedly in the air as if I was Orphan Annie and she was that wonderful character played by Anne Reinking who Dad said had spectacular legs. "Yes," I said, standing up. "Wonderful." She clasped her hands together—sort of like a fashion designer admiring his own fall line. "I'll get your address from the office and give it to Jade." At this point, I noticed Dad in the Volvo, parked by the curb. He was probably watching us, but I couldn't see his face, only his splotchy outline in the driver's seat. The windshield and windows mirrored the oak trees and the yellowed sky. "That must be your ride," Hannah said following my stare. "See you Sunday?" I nodded. Her arm lightly around my shoulder—she smelled like pencil lead and soap, and, oddly enough, a vintage clothing store—she walked me toward the car, waving at Dad before continuing down the sidewalk toward the Faculty Parking Lot.

82 MAR1SHA PES8L "You're absurdly late," I said, pulling the door closed. "I apologize," Dad said. "I was walking out of the office when the most appalling student marched in, held me hostage with the most mundane questions—" "Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about." "Don't sell yourself short. You're more Masterpiece Theatre." He started the car, squinting in the rearview mirror. "And that, I deduce, was the meddling woman from the shoe store?" I nodded. "What'd she want this time?" "Nothing. Just wanted to say hello." I intended to tell him the truth; I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to run off with some "slack-jawed Suzy," some "invertebrate," a "post-pubescent wasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfare to be that rivalry which occurs between apes"—but then we were accelerating past Bartleby Athletic Center and the football field where a crowd of shirtless boys leapt into the air like trout as they hit soccer balls with their heads. And as we rounded the chapel, Hannah Schneider was directly in front of us unlocking the door to an old red Subaru, one of the back doors dented like a Coke can. She brushed her hair off her forehead as she watched our passing car, and smiled. It was the distinct, secret smile of adulterous housewives, bluffing poker players, consummate con artists in mug shots and I decided, in that split second, to hold onto what she said, cup it tightly in my hands, setting it free only at the last possible second. Dad, on Having a Secret, Well-Laid Plan: "There is nothing more delirious to the human mind."

Madame Bovary

^here was a poem Dad was quite fond of and knew by heart, entitled "My Darling" or "Mein Liebling" by the late German poet, Schubert Koenig Bonheoffer (1862-1937). Bonheoffer was crippled, deaf, had only one eye, but Dad said he was able to discern more about the nature of the world than most people in possession of all their senses. For some reason, and perhaps unfairly, the poem always reminded me of Hannah. "Where is the soul of my Darling?" I ask, Oh, somewhere her soul must be, It lives not in words, nor in promises, Mutable as gold hers can be. "It's in the eyes," the great poets say, " 'Tis where the soul must dwell." But watch her eyes; they glisten bright At news of heaven and of hell. I once believed her crimson lips, Marked her soul soft as winter's snow, But then they curled at tales dismal, sad; What it meant, I could not know. I thought her fingers, then, her slender hands, 'Cross her lap, they're delicate doves,

84 MÂRVÔU PESSL

Though sometimes cold as ice to touch, They surely hint of all she loves. Aye, but there are moments she waves farewell, I confess my Darling I do not follow, She vanishes from view 'fore I reach the road, Windows bare, house quiet and hollow. And at times I wish I might read her walk, Like a sailor his map o' the sea, Or find instructions for her looks, Explaining all she hopes will be. How curious such an enlightened life! God Himself wouldn't deign to doubt her, Instead, I'm left a-wondering, Darling's shadows lurking about her. Dinner at Hannah's was a honey-bunch tradition, held more or less every Sunday for the past three years. Charles and his friends looked forward to the hours at her house (the address itself, a little enchanting: 100 Willows Road) much in the way New York City's celery-thin heiresses and beetroot B-picture lotharios looked forward to noserubbing at the Stork Club certain sweaty Saturday nights in 1943 (see Forget About El Morocco: The Xanadu of the New York Elite, the Stork Club, 1929-1965, Riser, 1981). "I can't remember how it all started, but the five of us just got on with her famously," Jade told me. "I mean, she's an amazing woman—anyone can see that. We were freshman, taking her film class, and we'd spend hours after school sitting in her classroom talking about any old thing—life, sex, Forrest Gump. And then we started going to dinner and things. And then she invited us over for Cuban food and we stayed up all night howling. About what I don't remember, but it was amazing. Of course, we had to be hushhush about it. Still do. Havermeyer doesn't like relationships between teachers and students that go beyond faculty advising or athletic coaching. He's afraid of shades of gray, if you know what I mean. And that's what Hannah is. A shade of gray." Of course, I didn't know any of this that first afternoon. In fact, I wasn't even positive I knew my own name as I rode next to Jade, the very disturbing

SPECIAL TOPICS I I CALAMITY PHYSICS 85 person who only two days prior had maliciously directed me toward the Demonology Guild. I'd actually assumed I'd been stood up again; by 3:30 P.M. there'd been no sign of her, or anyone. That morning, I'd hinted to Dad that I might have a Study Group later that afternoon (he'd frowned, surprised I was willing to subject myself again to such torture), but in the end, there was no need to give him a lengthier explanation; he'd disappeared to the university, having left a critical book on Ho Chi Minh in his office. He'd phoned to say he'd simply finish his latest Forum essay there—"The Trappings of Iron-Clad Ideologies," or something to that effect—but would be home for dinner. I'd sat down in the kitchen with a chicken salad sandwich, resigned to an afternoon of Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text (Faulkner, 1990), when I heard the extended howl of a car horn in the driveway. "I'm appallingly late. I am so sorry," a girl shouted through the inchopened, tinted window of the blubbery black Mercedes beached at the front door. I couldn't see her, only her squinting eyes of indeterminate color and some beach-blond hair. "Are you ready? Otherwise I might have to take off without you. Traffic's a bitch." Hastily, I grabbed keys to the house and the first book I could find, one of Dad's favorites, Civil War Endgames (Agner, 1955), and ripped a page from the back. I scrawled a terse note (Study Group, Ulysses) and left it for him on the round table in the foyer without even bothering to sign it "Love, Christabel." And then I was in her killer whale of a Mercedes, all Disbelief, Awkwardness and Outright Panic as I compulsively glanced at the speedometer trembling toward 80 mph, her lazy manicured hand slung atop the steering wheel, her blond hair in the cruel bun, the sandal straps XXXing up her legs. Candelabra earrings broadsided her neck every time she took her eyes off the highway to survey me with a look of "corroding tolerance." (It was how Dad described his mood waiting for June Bug Shelby Hollow tending to her acrylic nails, creative half-a-head highlights and pedicured feet—"With bunionettes," Dad noted—at Hot-2-Trot Hair & Nails.) "Yeah, so this"—Jade touched the front of the elaborate, parrot-green kimono dress she was wearing; she must have thought I was silently admiring her outfit—"this was a gift to my mom Jefferson when she entertained Hirofumi Kodaka, some loaded Japanese businessman for three grisly nights at the Ritz in 1982. He had jetlag and didn't speak English so she was his twentyfour-hour translator if you know what I mean—Get off the fucking road!" She leaned on the horn; we veered in front of a lowly gray Oldsmobile driven by

86 MAR1SHA PESSL an old lady no bigger than a Dixie cup. Jade craned her neck around to give her a dirty look, then flipped her off. "Why doncha go to a graveyard and kick the bucket, old bag." We darted down Exit 19. "That reminds me," she said, tossing me a look. "Why didn't you show?" "What?" I managed to ask. "You weren't there. We waited." "Oh. Well, I went to room 208—" "208?" She made a face. "It was 308." She wasn't fooling anyone. "You wrote 208," I said quietly. "I did not. I remember perfectly—308. And you totally missed out. We had a cake for you and a lot of icing and candles and everything," she added sort of absentmindedly (I was bracing myself for tales of hired belly dancers, elephant rides, whirling dervishes), but then, to my relief, she leaned forward and with a haughty, "God, I love Dara and the Bouncing Checks," turned the CD way up, a heavy metal band with a lead singer that sounded as if he were being gouged by bulls at Pamplona. We drove on, not a word spoken between us. (She'd resolved to shake me off like a hit funnybone.) She checked her watch, winced, huffed, damned stop lights, road signs, anyone abiding the speed limit in front of us, proudly surveyed her blue eyes in the rearview mirror, brushed specks of mascara off her cheeks, dabbed her lips with glittery pink lip gloss and then more glittery lip gloss so some of it started to ooze off the side of her mouth—a detail I didn't have the guts to point out. In fact, driving to Hannah's made the girl so apparently restless and anxiety ridden, I couldn't help but wonder if at the end of this nauseating parade of woods and pastures and nameless dirt roads, and shoe-box barns and gaunt horses waiting by fences, I'd find not a house, but a black door barred by a velvet rope, a man with a clipboard who'd look me over and, when ascertaining I didn't know Frank or Errol or Sammy personally (nor any other titan of entertainment), would declare me unfit to enter, by inference, to continue living. But at last, at the very end of the twisting gravel road was the house, an awkward, wooden-faced coy mistress clinging to half a hill with bulky additions stuck to her sides like giant faux pas. As soon as we parked by the other cars and rang the bell, Hannah swung open the front door in a wave of Nina Simone, Eastern spices, perfume, Eau de Somethingfrench, her face warm as the living room light. A pack of seven or eight dogs, all different breeds and sizes, crept nervously behind her.

SPECIAL TOPICS IK CALAMITY PHYSICS 87 "This is Blue," Jade said indifferently, walking inside. "Of course," said Hannah, smiling. She was barefoot, wearing chunky gold bracelets and an African batik caftan in orange and yellow. Her dark hair was a perfect swish of ponytail. "The lady of the hour." To my surprise, she hugged me. It was an Epic Hug, heroic, big budget, sprawling, with ten thousand extras (not short, grainy and made on a shoestring). When she finally let go, she grabbed my hand and squeezed it the way people at airports grab the hands of people they haven't seen in years, asking how the flight was. She pulled me next to her, her arm around my waist. She was unexpectedly thin. "Blue meet Fagan, Brody, he's got three legs—though it doesn't stop him from going through the garbage — Fang, Peabody, Arthur, Stallone, the Chihuahua with half-a-tail—accident with a car door—and the Old Bastard. Don't look him in the eye." She was referring to a skin-and-bones greyhound with the red eyes of a middle-aged, midnight tollbooth collector. The other dogs glanced at Hannah doubtfully, as if she were introducing them to a poltergeist. "Somewhere around here are the cats," she continued. "Lana and Turner, the Persians, and in the study we have our lovebird. Lennon. I'm in desperate need of an Ono, but there aren't many birds that show up at the shelter. Want some oolong tea?" "Sure," I said. "Oh, and you haven't met the others yet, have you?" I looked up from the black-and-tan Chihuahua, who'd snuck over to me to consider my shoes, and saw them. Including Jade, who'd flopped down onto a half-melted chocolate couch and lit a cigarette (aiming it at me like a dart), they each stared with eyes so immobile and bodies so stiff, they might have been the series of paintings Dad and I scrutinized in the nineteenthcentury Masters Gallery at the Chalk House outside Atlanta. There was the scrawny girl with brown seaweed hair, hugging her knees on the piano bench (Portrait of a Peasant Girl, pastel on paper); a tiny kid wearing Ben Franklin spectacles, Indian-style by a mangy dog, Fang (Master with Foxhound, British, oil on canvas); and another, a huge, boxy-shouldered boy leaning against a bookshelf, his arms and ankles crossed, brittle black hair sagging across his forehead (The Old Mill, artist unknown). The only one I recognized was Charles in the leather chair (The Gay Shepherd, gilt frame). He smiled encouragingly, but I doubted it meant much; he seemed to hand out smiles like a guy in a chicken costume distributing coupons for a free lunch. "Why don't you introduce yourselves?" Hannah said cheerfully.

88 MÀR1SHÀ PESSL They said their names with paint-by-numbers politeness. "Jade." "We've met," said Charles. "Leulah," said the Peasant Girl. "Milton," said the Old Mill. "Nigel Creech, very pleased to meet you," said the Master with Foxhound, and then he flashed a smile, which disappeared instantly like a spark off a defunct lighter.

If all histories have a period known as The Golden Age, somewhere between The Beginning and The End, I suppose those Sundays during Fall Semester at Hannah's were just that, or, to quote one of Dad's treasured characters of cinema, the illustrious Norma Desmond as she recalled the lost era of silent film: "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces." I sort of like to think the same was true back in those days at Hannah's (Visual Aid 8.0). (Forgive my regrettable rendering of Charles—and Jade for that matter; they were much more beautiful in real life.) Charles was the handsome one (handsome in the opposite way of Andreo). Gold-haired, mercury-tempered, he was not only St. Gallway's Track and Field star, excelling at both hurdles and the high jump, but also its Travolta. It wasn't unusual to see him sliding between classes engaged in a shameless, campus-wide soft shoe, involving not only known Gallway beauties but also the less physically heralded. Somehow he was able to twirl one girl away by the Teacher's Lounge just as another rumbaed over to him, and they pachangaed down the hall. (Amazingly, no one's feet were ever stepped on.) Jade was the terrifying beauty (see "Tawny Eagle," Magnificent Birds of Prey, George, 1993). She swooped into a classroom and girls scattered like chipmunks and squirrels. (The boys, equally afraid, played dead.) She was brutally blond ("bleached to the hilt," I heard Beth Price remark in AP English), five-feet-eight ("wiry"), stalked the halls in short skirts, her books in a black leather bag ("Guess she's Donna fucking Karan") and what I took to be a severe and sad look on her face, though most took it for conceit. Due to Jade's fortresslike manner, which, like any well-built castle, made access challenging, girls found her existence not only threatening, but flat out wrong. Although Bartleby Athletic Center featured the latest advertising campaign of Ms. Sturds's three-member Benevolent Body-Image Club (laminated Vogue

BV/M VISUAL AID 8.O

90 MÀR1SHA PESSL and Maxim covers above captions, "You Can't Have Thighs Like This and Still Walk" and "All Airbrushing"), Jade would only have to swan by, munching on a Snickers to reveal a disturbing truth: you could have thighs like that and still walk. She emphasized what few wanted to accept, that some people did win Trivial Pursuit: The Deity Looks Edition and there wasn't a thing you could do about it, except come to terms with the fact you'd only played Trivial Pursuit: John Doe Genes and come away with three pie pieces. Nigel was the cipher (see "Negative Space," Art Lessons, Trey, 1973, p. 29). At first glance (even at second and third), he was ordinary. His face — rather his entire being—was a buttonhole: small, narrow, uneventful. He stood no more thanfive-feet-fivewith a round face, brown hair, features weak and baby-feet pink (neither complemented nor marred by the wire glasses he wore). At school, he sported thin, tonguelike neckties in neon orange, a fashion statement I guessed was his effort to force people to take notice of him, much like a car's hazard lights. And yet, upon closer examination, the ordinariness was extraordinary: he bit his nails into thumbtacks; spoke in hushed spurts (uncolored guppies darting through a tank); in large groups, his smile could be a dying light bulb (shining reluctantly, flickering, disappearing); and a single strand of his hair (once found on my skirt after sitting next to him), held directly under a light, shimmered with every color in a rainbow, including purple. And then there was Milton, sturdy and grim, with a big, cushiony body like someone's favorite reading chair in need of reupholstering (see "American Black Bear," Meat-Eating Land Animals, Richards, 1982). He was eighteen, but looked thirty. His face, cluttered with brown eyes, curly black hair, a swollen mouth, had a curdled handsomeness to it, as if, incredibly, it wasn't what it'd once been. He had an Orson Wellian quality, Gerardepardieuian too: one suspected his large, slightly overweight frame smothered some kind of dark genius and after a twenty-minute shower he'd still reek of cigarettes. He'd lived most of his life in a town called Riot in Alabama and thus spoke in a Southern accent so gooey and thick you could probably cut into it and spread it on dinner rolls. Like all Mysteriosos, he had an Achilles' heel: a giant tattoo on his upper right arm. He refused to talk about it, went to great pains to conceal it—never removing his shirt, always wearing long sleeves—and if some clown during P.E. asked him what it was, he either stared at the kid as if he were a Price Is Right rerun, barely blinking, or replied in his molasses accent: "Nunna ya goddamn business."

SPECIAL TOPICS I I CALAMITY PHYSICS 91 And then there was the delicate creature (see Juliet, J. W. Waterhouse, 1898). Leulah Maloney was pearl skinned, with skinny bird arms and long brown hair always worn in a braid, like one of those cords aristocracy pulled in the nineteenth century to summon servants. Hers was an eerie, old-fashioned beauty, a face at home in amulets or carved into cameos—a romantic look I actually used to wish I had whenever Dad and I were reading about Gloriana in The Faerie Queene (Spenser, 1596) or discussing Dante's love for Beatrice Portinari. ("Know how difficult it is to find a woman that looks like Beatrice in today's world?" asked Dad. "You've a better chance running at the speed of light.-) Early in the Fall, when I least expected it, I'd spot Leulah in a long dress (usually white or diaphanous blue) strolling the Commons in the middle of a downpour, holding her little antique face up to the rain while everyone else streaked past her screaming, textbooks or disintegrating Gallway Gazettes held over their heads. Twice I noticed her like this—another time, crouched in Elton House shrubbery, apparently fascinated by a piece of bark or tulip bulb—and I couldn't help but think such faerielike behavior was all very calculated and irritating. Dad had carried on a tedious five-day affair with a woman named Birch Peterson in Okush, New Mexico, and Birch, having been born outside Ontario on a "terrific" free-loving commune called Verve, was always entreating Dad and me to walk untroubled in rain, bless mosquitoes, eat tofu. When she came for dinner she said a prayer before we "consumed," a fifteen-minute plea asking "Shod" to bless every slime mold and mollusk. "The word God is inherently male," said Birch, "so I came up with she, he, and God rolled into one. Shod exemplifies the truly genderless Higher Power." I concluded Leulah —Lu, as they all called her—with her gossamer dresses, reedy hair, decisions to skip daintily along everything but sidewalks, had to have Birch's persona of bean curd, that esprit de spirulina, until I discovered someone had actually hexed the girl, cast a powerful spell, so her oddities were eternally unthinking, careless and unscripted, so she never questioned what people thought or how she looked, so the cruelties of the entire kingdom ("There's something sour about her. She's totally past her Eat-by date," I heard Lucille Hunter remark in AP English) dissolved miraculously—never reaching her ears. Since much has already been made of Hannah's paramount face, I won't

92 MÀRÎSHA PESSL mention it again, except to say, unlike other Helens of Troy, who can never quite get over their own magnificence, like a pair of perilously high heels they're always wandering around in (self-consciously stooped over or haughtily towering over everyone), Hannah managed to wear hers day and night and still be only vaguely aware she was wearing shoes. With her, you noticed how exhausting beauty actually was, how used up one might feel after a day of strangers rubbernecking to watch you pour Sweet'N Low into your coffee or pick out the tin of blueberries with the least mold. "Whatever," Hannah said, without a trace of false modesty when, one Sunday, Charles commented how great she looked in a black T-shirt and army fatigues. "I'm just a tired old lady." There was, too, the problem of her name. While it cartwheeled off the tongue nimbly enough, more elegantly than, say, Juan San Sebastien Orillos-Maripon (the lip-calisthenics name of Dad's teaching assistant at Dodson-Miner), I couldn't help but think there was something criminal about it. Whoever had named her—mother, father, I didn't know—was a person harrowingly out of touch with reality, because even as an infant, Hannah could never have been one of those troll-babies, and a troll-baby was what you dubbed "Hannah." (Granted, I was biased: "Thank God that thing's incarcerated in his carriage. Otherwise, people might start to panic, thinking we have a veritable War of the Worlds on our hands," Dad said, peering down at a happy, yet decidedly elderly baby parked in an aisle at Office Depot. Then the mother arrived. "I see you've met Hannah!" she cried.) If she had to have a common name, she was Edith or Nadia or Ingrid, at the very least, Elizabeth or Catherine; but her glass-slipper name, the one that really fit, was something along the lines of Countess Saskia Lepinska, or Anna-Maria d'Aubergette, even Agnes of Scudge or Ursula of Poland ("Hideous names on beautiful women tend to rumplestiltskin quite nicely," Dad said). "Hannah Schneider" fit her like stonewashed Jordache jeans six sizes too big. And once, oddly enough, when Nigel said her name during dinner, I could have sworn I noticed a funny delay in her response, as if, for a split second, she had no idea he was talking to her. It made me wonder, even if it was solely on the subconscious level, maybe Hannah Schneider didn't love "Hannah Schneider" either. Maybe she wished she was Angélique von Heisenstagg too.

SPECIAL TOPICS IK CALAMITY PHYSICS 93 Many people speak enviously of the Fly on a Wall. They yearn for its characteristics: virtually invisible, yet privy to the secrets and shifty dialogues of an exclusive group of people. And yet, as I was nothing more than a fly on a wall for those first six, maybe seven Sunday afternoons at Hannah's, I can say with some authority such disregard gets old fairly quickly. (Actually, one could argue flies elicited more attention than I did, because someone always rolled up a magazine and doggedly chased them around a room, and no one did that to me —unless one counted Hannah's erratic attempts to insert me into the conversation, which I found more embarrassing than the others' disdain.) Of course, that very first Sunday ended up nothing more than a disastrous humiliation, in many ways worse than the Study Group at Leroy 's, because at least Leroy and the others had wanted me there (granted, wanted me as their beast of burden, so I could haul them up the steep hill toward eighth grade), but these kids —Charles, Jade and the others—they made it clear my presence at the house was entirely Hannah's idea, not theirs. "Know what I hate?" Nigel asked pleasantly as I helped him clear the plates off the dinner table. "What?" I asked, grateful he was attempting small talk. "Shy people," he replied, and of course there was no ambiguity about what shy person had prompted this announcement; I'd remained entirely mute during both dinner and dessert and the one instance Hannah had asked me a question ("You just moved here from Ohio?"), I was so taken aback my voice stumbled on the curb of my teeth. And then, minutes later, when I was pretending to be fascinated by the paperback cookbook Hannah had wedged next to her CD player, Cooking Without Processed Foods (Chiobi, 1984), I overhead Milton and Jade in the kitchen. He was asking her—in all seriousness it seemed —if I spoke English. She laughed. "She must be one of those Russian mail-order brides," she said. "With those looks though, Hannah got seriously ripped off. I wonder what the return policy is. Hopefully we can send her back COD." Minutes later, Jade was driving me home like a bat out of hell (Hannah must have only paid minimum wage) and I stared out the window, thinking it had been the most horrible night of my life. Obviously I'd never speak to these halfwits, these simpletons ("banal, spiritless teenagers," Dad would add) ever again. And I wouldn't give that sadistic Hannah Schneider the time of day either; it was she, after all, who'd lured me to that snake pit, let me flail around with nothing but a chic smile on her face as she chitchatted about homework or what fifth-tier college those slack-jawed mopes hoped to

94 MARISHA PESSL squeeeeze their way into, and then after dinner, that unforgivable way she calmly lit a cigarette, her manicured hand tipped into the air like a delicate teakettle, as if all was fantastic with the world. But then I don't know what happened. The following Tuesday, I passed Hannah briefly in Hanover Hall—"See you this weekend?" she called out brightly through the crowd of students; naturally my reaction was that of a deer in headlights—and then, on Sunday, Jade appeared in the driveway again, this time at 2:15 P.M. and the entire window unrolled. "Coming?" she shouted. I was powerless as a maiden who'd been fed upon by vampires. Zombielike, I told Dad I'd forgotten about my Study Group and before he could protest, I'd kissed him on the cheek, assured him it was a St. Gallwaysponsored event and fled the house. Embarrassedly—and then, after a month, kind of resignedly—I settled into my appointed role as fly on the wall, as barely tolerated mute, because the truth was, when it came down to it (and I could never admit this to Dad), being snubbed at Hannah's was infinitely more electrifying than being mulled over back at the Van Meer's.

Wrapped up like an expensive gift in her emerald batik caftan, her purple and gold sari or some wheat-colored housedress straight out of Peyton Place (for this comparison you had to pretend you didn't see the cigarette burn at the hip), on Sunday afternoons, Hannah entertained, in the old-fashioned, European sense of the word. Even now, I don't understand how she managed to prepare those extravagant dinners in her tiny mustard-yellow kitchen — Turkish lamb chops ("with mint sauce"), Thai steak ("with ginger-infused potatoes"), beef noodle soup ("Authentic Pho Bo"), on one less successful occasion, a goose ("with cranberry rub and sage carrot fries"). She cooked. The very air began to sauté in a reduction of candle, wine, wood, her perfume, and damp animal. We picked through the remains of our homework. The kitchen door swung open, and she stepped forth, a Birth of Venus in a red apron smeared with mint sauce, walking with the fast, swingy grace of Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, all soft bare feet (if those were toes, what you had was something else altogether, tuds), twinkles at her earlobes, the pronunciation of certain words with little shivers on the endings. (The same word, when you said it, went limp.)

SPECIAL TOPICS IK CALAMITY PHYSICS 95 "How's everything? Getting everything done, I hope?" she said in her alwaysalittlehoarse voice. She carried the silver tray to the hunchback coffee table, kicking a paperback on the floor missing half its cover (The Lib Wo by Ari So): more Gruyère and British farmhouse cheddar fanned around the plate like Busby Berkeley girls, another pot of oolong tea. Her appearance caused the dogs and cats to come out of their salooned shadows and band around her, and when she returned in a swoosh to the kitchen (they weren't allowed, when she was cooking), they roamed the living room like dazed cowboys, unsure what to do with themselves with no showdown. Her house ("Noah's Arc," Charles called it) I found fascinating, schizophrenic, in fact. Its original personality was old-fashioned and charming, albeit slightly outmoded and wooden (the two-floor log cabin structure built in the late 1940s with a stone fireplace and low, beamed ceilings). Yet there was another persona lurking inside as well, which could spring forth unexpectedly as soon as one turned a corner, a profane, common, at times embarrassingly crude disposition (the boxy aluminum-siding additions she'd made to the ground floor the previous year). Every room was crammed with so much worn, mismatched furniture (stripe married to plaid, orange engaged to pink, paisley coming out of the closet), at any position in any of the rooms, you could take a haphazard Polaroid and end up with a snapshot that bore a startling resemblance to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Instead of misshapen cube-ladies filling the frame, the angular shapes would be Hannah's skewed bookshelf (used, not for a library, but for displaying plants, Oriental ashtrays and her chopstick collection, with a few notable exceptions: On the Road [Kerouac, 1957], Change Your Brain [Leary, 1988], Modem Warriors [Chute, 1989], a Bob Dylan book of lyrics and Queenie [1985] by Michael Korda), Hannah's blistered leather chair, Hannah's samovar by the hat rack devoid of hats, the end table without an end. Hannah's furnishings weren't the only things tired and poor. I was surprised to observe that, despite her immaculate appearance, which rarely, upon even the closest inspections, had an eyelash out of place, some of her clothes were somewhat fatigued in appearance, though this was only obvious if you were sitting next to her and she happened to shift a certain way. There, suddenly, the lamplight stone-skipped across hundreds of tiny lint balls rippling through the front of her wool skirt, or, very faintly, as she picked up her

96 UÂKVoU PESSL wineglass and laughed like a man, the unmistakable smell of mothballs embedded in all that Palais de Anything. A lot of her clothes looked as if they'd gone a night without sleeping or had taken the red-eye, like her canary-and-cream Chanel-like suit with the weary hem, or her white cashmere sweater with the haggard elbows and debilitated waist, and a few articles, like the silver blouse with the drooping rose safety-pinned to the neck, actually looked like runner-ups in a three-day Depression dance marathon (see They Shoot Horses, Don't They?). I overheard the others referring to Hannah's "secret trust fund" on countless occasions, but I assumed these suppositions were incorrect and a precarious financial situation lay at the heart of Hannah's evident thrift store purchases. I once watched Hannah over a rump of lamb "with tea leaves and cherry-rose compote" and envisioned her teetering, like a cartooned man, drunk and blindfolded, on the craggy cliffs of Bankruptcy and Ruin. (Even Dad lamented teachers' salaries in a Bourbon Mood: "And they wonder why Americans can't locate Sri Lanka on a map! I hate to break the news to them, but there ain't no grease for the wheel of American education! Non dinero! Kein Geld!") As it turned out, money had nothing to do with it. On one occasion, when Hannah was outside with the dogs, Jade and Nigel were laughing about the gigantic peeling wagon wheel that had just appeared that day, leaning against the side of the garage like a fat man on a cigarette break. It was missing half its spokes and Hannah had announced she was planning to turn it into a coffee table. "St. Gallway must not pay her enough," I noted quietly. Jade turned to me. "What?" she asked, as if I'd just insulted her. I swallowed. "Maybe she should ask for a raise." Nigel suppressed his laughter. The others seemed content to ignore me, but then, something unexpected happened: Milton lifted his head from his Chemistry textbook. "Oh, no," he said smiling. I felt my heart shudder and stall. Blood began to flood my cheeks. "Junkyards, dumps —Hannah goes nuts for 'em. All this stuff? She found it in sad places, trailer parks, parkin' lots. She's been known to stop in the middle of a highway—cars honkin' crazy, mad pile-up—just so she can rescue a chair from the side of the road. The animals too—she saved them from shelters. I was with her once, last year when she stopped for a freaky-ass hitchhiker—muscles, head shaved, total skinhead. The back of his neck read, 'Kill or Be Killed.' I asked her what she was doin' and she said she

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 97 had to show him kindness. That maybe he never had any. And she was right. Guy was like a kid, smilin' the whole way. We dropped him off at Red Lobster. He shouted, 'God bless you!' Hannah had made his year." He shrugged and returned to his Chemistry. "S'just who she is." Who she was, too, was a woman surprisingly daring and competent, whine and whimper free. The woman could fix, in a matter of minutes, any clog, drip, leak, seep—slacker toilet flushes, pipe clangs before sunrise, a dazed and confused garage door. Frankly, her handyman expertise made Dad look like a twitchy-mouthed grandmother. One Sunday, I watched in awe while Hannah fixed her own recessed doorbell with electrician gloves, screwdriver and voltmeter—not the easiest of processes, if one reads Mr. Fix-It's Guide to Rewiring the Home (Thurber, 2002). Another occasion, after dinner, she disappeared into the basement to fix the temperamental light on her water heater: "There's too much air in the flue," she said with a sigh. And she was an expert mountaineer. Not that she boasted: "I camp," was all she'd say. One could infer it, however, from the overload of Paul Bunyan paraphernalia: carabiners and water bottles lying around the house, Swiss army knives in the same drawer as junk mail and old batteries; and in the garage, brawny hiking boots (seriously gnarled soles), moth-eaten sleeping bags, rock-climbing rope, snowshoes, tent poles, crusty sunscreen, a first-aid kit (empty, apart for blunt scissors and discolored gauze). "What're those?" Nigel asked, frowning at what looked like two vicious animal traps atop a pile of firewood. "Crampons," Hannah said, and when he continued to stare confusedly: "So you don't fall off the mountain." She once admitted as a footnote to dinner conversation, she'd saved a man's life while camping as a teenager. "Where?" asked Jade. She hesitated, then: "The Adirondacks." I'll admit I almost leapt from my seat and boasted, "I've saved a life too! My shot gardener!" but thankfully I had some tact; Dad and I held in contempt people forever interrupting fascinating conversations with their own rinky-dink story. (Dad called them What-About-Mes, accompanying said phrase with a slow blink, his gesture of Marked Aversion.) "He'd fallen, injured his hip." She said it slowly, deliberately, as if playing Scrabble, concentrating on sorting the letters, compiling clever words. "We were alone, in the middle of nowhere. I panicked—I didn't know what to do. I ran and ran. Forever. Thankfully, I found campers who had a

98 MAR1SHA PESSL radio and they sent help. After that, I made a pact with myself. I'd never be helpless again." "So the man was okay?" Leulah asked. Hannah nodded. "He had to have surgery. But he was fine." Of course, further inquiry into this intriguing incident—"Who was the guy?" Charles asked—was trying to scratch a diamond with a toothpick. "Okay, okay," Hannah said, laughing as she cleared Leulah's plate, "that's enough for tonight, I think." She kneed the swish door (a little aggressively I thought) and vanished into the kitchen.

We usually sat down for dinner around 5:30 P.M. Hannah turned off the lights, the music (Nat King Cole demanding to be flown to the moon, Peggy Lee sermonizing you're nobody 'til somebody loves you), lighting the thin red candles at the center of the table. Dinner conversation wasn't anything Dad would be particularly impressed with (no debates about Castro, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, though sometimes she brought up materialism; "It's hard, in America, not to equate happiness with things."), but Hannah, chin in her hand, eyes dark as caves, was a master of the Art of Listening, and thus dinners could last two, three hours, maybe even longer, if I hadn't been the one who had to get home by eight. ("Too much Joyce isn't good for you," Dad said. "Bad for digestion.") To describe this singular quality of hers (which I believe holds one of the brightest lanterns to her sometimes shadowy profile) is impossible, because what she did had nothing to do with words. It was just this way about her. And the wasn't premeditated, condescending, or forced (see Chapter 9, "Get Your Teen to Consider You The 'In' Crowd," Befriending Your Kids, Howards, 2000). Obviously, being able to simply , was a skill supremely underestimated in the Western world. As Dad was fond of pointing out, in America, apart from those who won the lottery, generally all Winners were in possession of a strident voice, which was successfully used to overpower the thrum of all the competing voices, thereby producing a country that was insanely loud, so loud, most of the time no actual meaning could be discerned—only "nationwide white noise." And thus when you met someone who listened, someone content to do nothing but , so over-

SPECIAL TOPICS }}{ CALAMITY PHYSICS 99 whelming was the difference, you had the startling and quite lonely epiphany that everyone else, every person you'd encountered since the day you were born who'd supposedly listened, had really not been listening to you at all. They'd been subtly checking out their own reflection in the glass bureau a little to the west of your head, thinking what they had to do later that evening, or deciding that next, as soon as you shut up, they were going to tell that classic story about their bout of Bangladeshi beachside dysentery, thereby showcasing how worldly, how wild (not to mention how utterly enviable) a human being they were. Hannah did ultimately speak, of course, but it wasn't to tell you what she thought or what you had to do, but only to ask you certain relevant questions, which were often laughable in their simplicity (one, I remember, was, "Well, what do you think?"). Afterward, when Charles cleared the plates, Lana and Turner jumped into her lap, fashioning her arm bracelets out of their tails, and Jade turned on the music (Mel Tormé detailing how you were getting to be a habit with him), you didn't feel the edgy feeling of being alone in the world. As stupid as this sounds—you felt you had an answer. It was this quality, I think, that made her have such an influence on the others. She was the reason Jade, for example, who sometimes talked of becoming a journalist, joined The Gallway Gazette as a freelance staff writer even though she downright loathed Hillary Leech, the editor-in-chief who pulled out a copy oïThe New Yorker and read it before every class (sometimes chuckling irritatingly at something in "The Talk of the Town"). And Charles sometimes carried around a three-inch textbook, How to Be a Hitchcock (Lerner, 1999), which I secretly paged through one Sunday and beheld the first-page inscription: "To my master of suspense. Love, Hannah." Leulah tutored fourth-graders in Science every Tuesday after school at Elmview Elementary, Nigel read The Definitive Foreign Service Exam Study Guide (2001 éd.), and Milton had taken an acting class at the UNCS the previous summer, Introduction to Shakespeare: The Art of the Body—acts of humanitarianism and self-improvement I couldn't help but think had originally been Hannah's suggestions, though proposed in her way, they probably believed they'd thought of it themselves. I, too, was not immune to her brand of inspiration. At the beginning of October, Hannah arranged with Evita for me to drop out of AP French with drapery-drab Ms. Filobeque and enroll with a bunch of freshmen in Beginning Drawing with the Dalf-decadent Mr. Victor Moats. (I did so without breathing a word to Dad.) Moats was Hannah's favorite teacher at Gallway.

îoo MARîSHA PESSL "I absolutely adore Victor/' she said, biting her bottom lip. "He's wonderful. Nigel's in one of his classes. Isn't he wonderful? I think he's wonderful. Really." And Victor was wonderful. Victor sported faux suede shirts in Permanent Magenta and Burnt Sienna and had hair that, under the art room lights, channeled the gleam of film noir streets, Humphrey Bogart's wingtips, opera footlights and tar, all at the same time. Hannah also bought me a sketchbook and five ink pens, which she wrapped in old-fashioned parcel paper and sent to my school mailbox. (She never talked about things. She simply did them.) On the inside cover, she'd written (in a handwriting that was a perfect extension of her—elegant, with tiny mysteries in the curves of her n's and h's): "For your Blue Period. Hannah." In the middle of class, occasionally I'd take the thing out and covertly try to draw something, like Mr. Archer's ranidae hands. Though I showed no signs of being an untapped El Greco, I enjoyed pretending I was a rheumatoid artiste, some Toulouse concentrating on the outline of bony arm of a can-can girl, instead of plain old Blue van Meer, who might go down in history for the talent of feverishly copying down every syllable a teacher uttered (including ums and ehs) in case it showed up on the Unit Test.

In her absorbing memoir, There's a Great Day Coming Mariana (1973), Florence "Feisty Freddie" Frankenberg, a 1940s their-girl-Friday actress whose great claim to fame was appearing on Broadway with Al Jolson in Hang on to Your Handkerchiefs (she also palled around with Gemini Cervenka and Oona O'Neill), wrote in Chapter 1 that at first glance, Saturday night at the Stork Club was an "oasis of rarified fun" and that, despite WWII grimly unfolding across the Atlantic like a telegram delivering bad news, when one was in a "new gown, perched on those comfy banquettes," one had the feeling "nothing bad could happen" because one was protected by "all the money and the mink" (p. 22-3). At second glance, however, as Feisty Freddie goes on to reveal in Chapter 2, the swanky Stork Club was in fact "as vicious as Rudolph Valentino with a dame who wouldn't knock knees with him" (p. 41). She writes that everyone, from Gable and Grable to Hemingway and Hayworth, was so anxious about where the proprietor, Sherman Billingsley, placed them in the room, whether they'd be allowed into that

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 101 rarefied-room-of-the-already-absurdly-rarefied, the Cub Room, one could "use the space between folks' necks and shoulders as a nutcracker" (p. 49). Freddie further reveals in Chapter 7 that on more than one occasion, she overheard certain studio honchos admitting they wouldn't think twice about "letting off a bullet or two into some balmy broad," in order to permanently secure that coveted banquette in the corner, Table 25, the Royal Circle, with its ideal view of the bar and the door (p. 91). And thus I have to mention tensions ran quite high at Hannah's, too, though I often wondered if I, like Feisty Freddie, was the only one who noticed. Sometimes it felt as if Hannah was J. J. Hunsecker and the others were sinuous Sidney Falcos vying to be her chosen charlie, her preferred pajama playboy, her dreamy de luxe. I remember those occasions Charles was working on his Third Reich timeline or his research paper on the USSR collapse for AP European History. He'd throw his pencil across the room. "I can't do this fucking assignment! Fuck Hitler! Fuck Churchill, Stalin and the Red Fuckin' Army!" Hannah would run upstairs to get a history book or an Encyclopaedia Britannica and when she returned, for an hour, their brown and gold heads huddled together like cold pigeons under the desk lamp, trying to figure out the month of Germany's invasion of Poland or exactly when the Berlin wall fell (September 1939, November 9, 1989). Once I spoke up, tried giving them a hand by pointing them in the direction of the 1200-page history text Dad always put at the top of his Required Reading, Hermin-Lewishon's famed History Is Power (1990) but Charles looked through me, and Hannah, flipping through the Britannica, was apparently one of those people who, while reading, could sit through an entire civil war between Sandinistas and U.S.backed Contras and hear nothing. During these interludes, though, I always noticed Jade, Lu, Nigel and Milton stopped working, and if their perpetual glances across the room were any indication, they sort of became hyperaware of Hannah and Charles, maybe even a little jealous, like a pride of starving lions in a zoo when only one of them is singled out and hand-fed. To be honest, I didn't particularly care for the way they acted around her. With me, they were edgy and aloof, but with Hannah—they seemed to confuse her rapt attention for Cecil B. DeMille's camera and a couple of klieg lights turned in their direction for principal shooting of The Greatest Show on Earth. Hannah would only have to ask Milton a question, commend him on some B+ he received in Spanish, and without delay he'd shuck off his usual

102 UAKVoWÂ PESSL deliberating Alabama drawl and weirdly take to the stage as plucky HI' Mickey Rooney, posturing posin', moonin' and muggin' all over the place like a six-year-old vaudeville veteran. "Spent all night studyin', never worked so hard in my life," he'd gush, his eyes running around her face, desperate for praise like spaniels after retrieving a shot duck. Leulah and Jade, too, were not above turning into HI' Bright Eyes and Curly Tops themselves. (I especially detested the occasions Hannah referred to Jade's beauty, as she turned into the sweetiest of all sweetie pies, Little Miss Broadway.) These manic tap dances were nothing compared to the awful occasions Hannah gave me the spotlight, like the night she mentioned I had the highest rank in school and was thus poised to be valedictorian. (Lacey Ronin-Smith had announced the coup d'etat during Morning Announcements. I'd ousted Radley Clifton who'd reigned, uncontested, for three years, and apparently believed, because his brothers, Byron and Robert, had been valedictorian, he, Radley the Razor-dull, held Divine Right to the title. Passing me in Barrow, his eyes narrowed and his mouth shrank, doubtlessly praying I'd be found guilty of Cheating and exiled.) "Your father must be so proud of you," Hannah said. "I'm proud of you. And let me tell you something. You're a person who can do anything with your life. I mean that. Anything. You can be a rocket scientist. Because you have the rare thing everyone wants. The smarts, but also the sensitivity. Don't be afraid of it. Remember—God, I can't remember who said it—'Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.' " This happened to be one of Dad's favorite quotations (it was Coleridge and Dad would tell her she'd butchered it; "If you're using your own words it isn't quite a quotation, is it?"). And she wasn't smiling as she said it to me, but looked solemn, as if talking about death (see I'll Think About That Tomorrow, Pepper, 2000). (She also sounded like FDR declaring war against Japan in his historical 1941 radio address, Track 21 on Dad's Great Speeches, Modern Times three-CD boxed set.) On the very best of days I was their burden, their bête noire, and so, if you considered Newton's Third Law of Motion, "All actions have an equal and opposite reaction," and the five of them spontaneously turned into HI' Baby Face Nelsons and Dimples, they also had to turn into old Lost Weekends and Draculas, which best describes the looks on their faces in that instance. For the most part though, I did my best to deflect such personal

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 103 attention. I didn't especially long for Table 25, The Royal Circle. I was still elated to be one of the jelly beans allowed in off the street, and was thus perfectly content to spend the evening, rather the entire swank decade, sitting at wholly undesirable Table 2, too close to the orchestra and with an obscured view of the door. Hannah, during their song'n'dance antics, remained impassive. She was all diplomatic smiles and kind "Fantastic, darlings," and it was during these moments I found myself wondering if I'd made a few errors in my breathless reading of her, if, as Dad said bluntly in the rare event he admitted he was wrong (accompanying said sentence with a contrite gaze at the floor): "I'd been a blind ass." She was, after all, highly peculiar when it came to talking about herself. Attempts to exhume details about her life, indirectly or otherwise, went nowhere. You think it'd be impossible for someone not to give some semblance of an answer when asked a question point-blank, making some very revealing dodge (sharp intake of breath, shifty eyes), which you could subsequently translate into a Dark Truth About Her Childhood using Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) or The Ego and the Id (1923). But Hannah had a very plain way of saying, "I lived outside Chicago, then San Francisco for two years. I'm not that interesting, guys." Or she'd shrug. "I —I'm a teacher. I wish I could say something more interesting." "But you're part-time," Nigel said once. "What do you do with the other part?" "I don't know. I wish I knew where the time went." She laughed and said nothing more. There was also the question of a certain word: Valerio. It was their mythical, tongue-and-cheek nickname for Hannah's secret Cyrano, her cloak-anddagger Darcy and her QT Oh Captain! My Captain! I'd heard them mention the word on countless occasions, and when I finally found the courage to inquire who, or what it was, so exciting was the subject, they forgot to ignore me. Eagerly, they recounted a puzzling incident. Two years ago, when they were sophomores, Leulah had left behind an Algebra textbook at Hannah's house. When her parents drove her back for the book the following day, while Hannah retrieved it upstairs, Lu went into the kitchen for a glass of water. She noticed, by the telephone, a small yellow notepad. On the topmost page, Hannah had doodled a strange word. "She'd written Valerio all over it," Lu said heatedly. She had a funny way

104 UAKVoU PESSL of wrinkling her nose, which made it look like a tiny bunched-up sock. "Like a million times. Kind of crazily too, the way psycho killers write things when the investigator breaks into his house on CSI. The one word over and over, like she was talking on the phone, unaware of what she was drawing. Still, I do stuff like that, so I didn't think anything of it. Until she walked in. She picked up the notepad immediately, facing the pages toward her so I couldn't see it. I don't think she put it down until I was in my car, driving away. I'd never seen her act so strange." Strange indeed. I took the liberty of looking up the word in Cambridge etymologist Louis Bertman's Words, Their Origin and Relevance (1921). Valerio was a common Italian patronymic meaning "brave and strong," derived from the Roman name Valerius, derived in turn from the Latin verb valere, "to be in healthy sprits, to be robust and sturdy." It was also the name of several minor saints in the fourth and fifth centuries. I asked them why they didn't simply ask Hannah outright who he was. "Can't do that," said Milton. "Why?" "We already did," said Jade with irritation, exhaling smoke from her cigarette. "Last year. And she turned a weird red color. Almost purple." "Like we'd smacked her in the head with a baseball bat," said Nigel. "Yeah, I couldn't tell if she was sad or pissed," Jade went on. "She just stood there with her mouth open, then disappeared into the kitchen. And when she came out, like, five minutes later, Nigel apologized. And she said in a fake administrator voice, oh, no, it's fine, it's just that she doesn't like us snooping or talking about her behind her back. It's hurtful." "Total bullshit," said Nigel. "It wasn't bullshit," Charles said angrily. "Well, we can't bring it up again," Jade said. "We don't want to give her another heart attack." "Maybe it's her Rosebud," I said, after a moment. Naturally, none of them were ever thrilled when I opened my mouth, but this time, every one of their heads swiveled toward me, almost in unison. "Her what?" asked Jade. "Have you seen Citizen Kane?" I asked. "Sure," said Nigel with interest. "Well, Rosebud is what the main character, Kane, searches for his entire life. It's what he's desperate to get back to. An unrequited, aching yearning for a simpler, happier time. It's the last thing he says before he dies."

SPECIAL TOPICS IK CALAMITY PHYSICS 105 "Why didn't he just go to a florist?" asked Jade distastefully. And thus Jade (who, although sometimes very literal, had a flair for the dramatic) enjoyed fashioning all kinds of exciting conclusions out of Hannah's mysteriousness whenever Hannah happened to be out of the room. Sometimes Hannah Schneider was an alias. At other times, Hannah was a member of the Federal Witness Protection Program after testifying against crime-tsar Dimitri "Caviar" Molotov of the Howard Beach Molotovs, and was thus chiefly responsible for his being found guilty of sixteen counts of fraud. Or else, she figured Hannah was one the Bin Ladins: "That family's big as the Coppolas." Once, after she happened to watch Sleeping with the Enemy at midnight on TNT, she told Leulah Hannah was hiding in Stockton in order to avoid detection by her ex-husband, who happened to be both physically abusive and clinically insane. (Naturally, Hannah's hair was dyed, her eyes, colored contacts.) "And that's why she hardly ever goes out and pays cash for everything. She doesn't want him to trace her credit cards." "She doesn't pay cash for everything," said Charles. "Sometimes she does." "Everyone on the planet sometimes pays cash." I humored these wild speculations, even designed a few interesting ones of my own, but of course, I didn't genuinely believe them. Dad, on Double Lives: "It's fun to imagine they're as epidemic as illiteracy or chronic fatigue syndrome or any other cultural malaise that graces the covers oîTime and Newsweek, but sadly, most Bob Joneses off the street are just that, Bob Jones, with no dark secrets, dark horses, dark victories, or dark sides of the moon. It's enough to make you give up on Baudelaire. Mind you, I'm not counting adultery, which isn't dark in the slightest, but rather clichéd." I thus secretly concluded Hannah Schneider was a typo. Destiny had been sloppy. (Most likely because she was overworked. Kismet and Karma were too flighty to get anything done and Doom couldn't be trusted.) Quite by accident, she'd assigned an outstanding person of breathtaking beauty to a buried mountain town, where grandeur was like that slighted tree always falling in the woods and no one noticing. Somewhere else, in Paris, or Hong Kong probably, someone named Chase H. Niderhann with a face compelling as a baked potato and a voice like a throat clearing, happened to be living her life, a life of opera, of sun and lakes and weekend excursions to Kenya (pronounced "keen-YA"), of gowns that went "Shhhhh" across a floor. I decided to take control of the situation (see Emma, Austen, 1816).

106 UAKVoU PESSL

It was October. Dad was dating a woman named Kitty (whom I hadn't yet had the pleasure of swatting away from our screen), but she was of no consequence. Why should Dad settle for a Standard American Wirehair when he could have a Persian? (I can blame Hannah's croony music taste for my wayward vision, old Peggy Lee and her incessant whining about the crazy moon and Sarah Vaughan sniveling about her lover man.) I acted with uncharacteristic vehemence that rainy Wednesday afternoon as I set my Disney-inspired plan into action. I told Dad I had a ride and then asked Hannah to drive me home. I made her wait in the car, giving her a lame excuse ("Hold on, I have a great book for you.") before I ran inside to pry Dad away from Patrick Kleinman's latest tome published by Yale University Press, The Chronicle of Collectivism (2004), so he'd come outside and talk to her. He did. In short, there was no world on a string, no tender trap, no wee small hour of the morning and certainly no witchcraft. Dad and Hannah exchanged moonless pleasantries. I believe Dad even said, "Yes, I've been meaning to attend one of those home football games. Blue and I will see you there," in an effort to clothespin the silence. "That's right," said Hannah. "You like football games." "Yes," said Dad. "Don't you have a book to lend me?" Hannah asked me. Within minutes, she was driving away with my only copy of Love in the Time of Cholera (Garcia Marquez, 1985). "Touched as I am by your efforts to play Cupid, my dear, in the future, please allow me to do my own riding into the sunset," Dad said as he walked inside.

That night I couldn't sleep. Even though I'd never said anything to Hannah, and she'd never said anything to me, a certain foolproof Thesis had been floating around in my head, that the only plausible explanation for her including me in the Sunday soirees, for her brutally shoehorning me in with the others (determined to pry open their airtight clique like a frenzied housewife with a jar opener) was that she wanted Dad. Because I couldn't have mistaken, at least back at Surely Shoos, her eyes hovering a little fretfully over

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 107 his face like green dragontails over a flower (Family Fapilionidae), that sure, she'd smiled at me back at Fat Kat Foods, but it was Dad whom she wanted to notice her, Dad whom she wanted to stun. But I was wrong. I tossed and turned, analyzing every look Hannah had thrown me, every word, smile, hiccup, throat clear and distinctly audible swallow until I was so confused, I could only lie on my left side staring at the windows with its swollen blue and white curtains where night melted so slowly it hurt. (Mendelshon Peet wrote in Loggerheads [1932], "Man's wobbly little mind isn't equipped for hauling around the great unknowns.") Finally I fell asleep. "Very few people realize, there's no point chasing after answers to life's important questions," Dad said once in a Bourbon Mood. "They all have fickle, highly whimsical minds of their own. Nevertheless. If you're patient, if you don't rush them, when they're ready, they'll smash into you. And don't be surprised if afterwards you're speechless and there are cartoon tweety birds chirping around your head." How right he was.

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he legendary Spanish conquistador Hernando Nunez de Valvida (La Serpiente Negra) wrote, in his diary entry of April 20, 1521 (a day he allegedly slaughtered two hundred Aztecs), "La gloria es un millôn ojos asustados" roughly translated as, "Glory is a million frightened eyes." This never meant much to me, until I became friends with them. If the Aztecs regarded Hernando and his henchmen with fright, then the entire St. Gallway student body (more than a few teachers too) regarded Charles, Jade, Lu, Milton and Nigel with awe and outright panic. They had a name, as all choice societies do. Bluebloods. And daily, hourly (possibly even minutely) that posh little word was whispered and whined over in envy and agitation in every classroom and corridor, every lab and locker room. "The Bluebloods catwalked into the Scratch this morning," said Donnamara Chase, a girl who sat two seats away from me in AP English. "They stood in the corner and went, 'Ew/ to everyone who walked by to the point that Sam Christenson—you know that mannish sophomore girl? Well, she actually broke down at the beginning of Chemistry. They had to cart her off to the Infirmary and all she'd say was that they made fun of her shoes. She was wearing Aerosole pink suede penny loafers in a size nine and a half. Which isn't even that bad." Obviously at Coventry Academy, at Greenside Junior High, there'd been the popular ones, the VIPs who cruised the halls like an arcade of limousines and invented their own tongue in order to intimidate like fierce Zaxoto tribesmen in the Côte d'Ivoire (at Braden Country I was a "mondo nuglo," whatever that meant), but the asthma-inducing mystique of the Bluebloods

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 109 was unparalleled. I think it was due in part to their diva foxiness (Charles and Jade were the Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly of our time), their for-real fabulousity (Nigel was so tiny he was trendy, Milton so vast he was vogue), their trippy confidence (there goes Lu proudly across the Commons, her dress on inside-out), but also, most singularly, because of certain tabloidal rumors about them, a HI' somethin' somethin' and Hannah Schneider. Hannah kept a surprisingly low profile; she taught only the one class, Intro to Film, in a squat building at the edge of campus called Loomis, famous for laundering credit fillers like Intro to the Fashion Business and Woodshop. And as Mae West is quoted in the out-of-print Are You Just Happy to See Me (Paulson, 1962): "Y'ain't nobody 'til you've had a sex scandal." Two weeks after my first dinner at Hannah's, I overheard two senior girls slinging such sleaze in my second period Study Hall, held in the Central Reading Room of the Donald E. Crush Library, monitored by crosswordpuzzle enthusiast, Mr. Frank Fletcher, a bald man who taught Driver's Ed. The girls were fraternal twins, Eliaya and Georgia Hatchett. With curly auburn hair, stout frames, shepherd's-pie potbellies and alehouse complexions, they resembled two oily portraits of King Henry VIII, each painted by a different artist (see The Faces of Tyranny, Clare, 1922, p. 322). "I don't get how she got a job at this school," said Eliaya. "She's three sandwiches short of a picnic." "Who're you talking about?" asked Georgia absentmindedly as she poured over colored photos in a magazine, VIP Weekly, her tongue sticking out the side of her mouth. "Duh. Hannah Schneider." Eliaya tipped her chair backward and drummed her fat fingers on the cover of the textbook on her lap, An Illustrated History of Cinema (Jenoah, 2002 éd.). (I could only assume she was enrolled in Hannah's class.) "She totally wasn't prepared today. She disappeared for fifteen minutes 'cause she couldn't find the DVD we were supposed to watch. We were supposed to watch The Tramp, but she comes back with friggin' Apocalypse Now, which Mom and Dad would go mental over— the movie's three hours of harlotry. But Hannah was like planetary—didn't have a clue. She puts it in, doesn't even think about the rating. So we see the first twenty minutes and the bell rings, and then that kid Jamie Century, he asks her when we're gonna see the rest and she says tomorrow. That she's changing the syllabus around a little. I'll bet by the end of the year we're watching Debbie Does Dallas. It was ghetto." "Your point?"

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"She's tweaked. Wouldn't be shocked if she went Klebold." Georgia sighed. "Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she's still banging Charles after all these years — " "Like a screen in a tornado. Sure." Georgia leaned closer to her sister. (I had to be very still to hear what she said.) "You really think the Bluebloods go all Caligula on the weekends? I'm not sure if I believe Cindy Willard." "Of course," said Eliaya. "Mom said royals only bed royals." "Oh, right," said Georgia, nodding, then breaking into toothy laughter, a sound like a wooden stool being dragged across a floor. "That's how they keep their gene pool from getting contaminated." Unfortunately, as Dad pointed out, there's often a seed of Truth within the Flash and Trash (he himself wasn't above perusing a few supermarket tabloids while standing in line: " 'Plastic Surgery Smash-ups of the Stars' — there's something rather compelling about that headline.") and I'll admit, ever since I saw Hannah and Charles together in the courtyard on the first day of school, I suspected there was something clammy going on between them (though I'd decided, after a Sunday or two, while Charles was almost certainly infatuated with Hannah, her attitude toward him was pleasantly platonic). And though I was in the dark regarding the Bluebloods' weekend activities (and would be until the middle of October) I did know they were quite preoccupied with maintaining the superiority of their line. I, of course, was the one contaminating it.

My inclusion into their Magic Circle was as painless as the invasion of Normandy. Sure, we had faces eventually, but for the first month or so— September, the very beginning of October—though I saw them all the time peacocking through campus, and acted as hushed, horrified journalist to the anxieties they inspired ("If I ever see Jade injured, facedown in the street, homeless, riddled with leprosy—I'll do humanity a favor and run her over," pledged Beth Price in my AP English class), I only ever hung out with them at Hannah's. And obviously, during those first few evenings, the scenario was more than a little humiliating. Obviously it made me feel like a dumpy bachelorette on a reality show called In-sta-love no one wanted to take for drinks and I sure as hell could forget about dinner. I'd sit on Hannah's shabby chaise longue with one of her dogs, pretending to be transfixed by my AP Art History

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homework while the five of them talked in hushed voices about how "hardcore," how "juiced," they'd been on Friday at mysterious places they'd nicknamed "The Purple" and "The Blind," and when Hannah emerged from the kitchen, immediately they'd hurl me greasy little sardine-smiles. Milton would blink, aw-shucks his knee and say, "So how's it goin', Blue? You're awful quiet over there." "She's shy," Nigel would observe, deadpan. Or Jade, who without fail dressed like a famous person working the red carpet at Cannes: "I love your shirt. I want one. You'll have to tell me where you got it." Charles smiled like a talk show host with poor Neilsen Ratings and Lu never said a word. Whenever my name was mentioned, she examined her feet. Hannah must have sensed we were heading toward a stalemate, because shortly thereafter, she launched her next assault. "Jade, why don't you take Blue with you when you go to Conscience? It might be fun for her," she said. "When are you going again?" "Don't know," Jade said drearily, sprawled on her stomach on the living room carpet, reading The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Ferguson, Salter, Stallworthy, 1996 éd.). "I thought you said you were going this week," Hannah persisted. "Maybe they can squeeze her in?" "Maybe," she said without looking up. I forgot this conversation, until that Friday, a worn, gray afternoon. After my last class, AP World History with Mr. Carlos Sandborn (who used so much gel, one always thought he'd just come from swimming laps at the Y), I returned to the third floor of Hanover to find Jade and Leulah standing by my locker: Jade, in a black Golightly dress, Leulah, a white blouse and skirt. Standing with her hands and feet together as if waiting for choir practice, Leulah looked pleasant enough, but Jade looked like a kid in a nursing home impatiently waiting for her designated fogey to be wheeled in so she could read him Watership Down in a monotone, thereby earning her Community Outreach credit, thereby graduating on time. "So we're going to get our hair and nails and eyebrows done and you're coming," Jade informed me with a hand on her hip. "Oh," I said, nodding, spinning through the combination of my padlock, though I don't think I was actually entering the combination, only vigorously turning it in one direction, then the other. "Ready?" "Now?" I asked.

112 UARVoU PESSL "Of course now." "I can't," I said. "I'm busy." "Busy? With what?" "My dad's picking me up." Four sophomore girls who'd drifted by had snagged, like garbage in a river, by the German Language Bulletin Board. They blatantly eavesdropped. "Oh, God," said Jade, "not your wonderdad again. You'll have to let us know his civilian name and what he looks like without the mask and the cape." (I'd made the serious mistake of bringing Dad up the previous Sunday. I think I actually said the phrase "brilliant man" in relation to him, also "one of the preeminent commentators on American culture at work in this country today," a line lifted verbatim from the two-page spread on Dad in TAPSIM, the American Political Science Institute's quarterly [see "Dr. Yes," Spring 1987, Vol. XXIV, Issue 9]. I'd said it because Hannah had asked what he did for a living, how he "kept busy," and something about Dad simply invited the boast, the brag, the self-congratulating monologue.) "She's just kidding," Lu said. "Come on. It'll be fun." I collected my books and walked outside with them to inform Dad my Ulysses Study Group had decided to meet for a few hours, but I'd be home for dinner. He frowned at the sight of Jade and Lu standing on the Hanover steps: "Those two tartlets think they can read Joyce? Heh. Good luck to them—let me revise that—pray for a miracle." I could tell he wanted to say no, but was reluctant to make a scene. "Very well," he said with a sigh and a pitying look. He started the Volvo. "Tallyho, my dear." As we walked to the Student Parking Lot, I heard his rave reviews. "Shit," Jade said, looking at me with surprised esteem. "Your dad's magnifico. You said he was brilliant but I didn't realize you meant in a Clooney way. If he wasn't your dad, I'd ask you to set me up with him." "He looks like what's his name . . . the father in The Sound of Music," said Lu. Frankly, it could get a little stale how Dad, within minutes, could elicit such worldwide acclaim. Sure—I was the first person to stand up and throw him roses, shout, "Bravo, man, bravo!" But sometimes I couldn't help but feel Dad was an opera diva who garnered reverential ratings even when he was too lazy to hit the high notes, forgot a costume, blinked after his own death scene; something about him seized approval from everyone, regardless

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 113 of the performance. For instance, when I passed Ronin-Smith, the guidance counselor, in Hanover Hall, it seemed she'd never gotten over the minutes Dad had spent in her office. She asked not "How are your classes?" but "How's your father, dear?" The only woman who'd met him and not inquired after him ad nauseam was Hannah Schneider. "Right. . . Mr. Von Trapp," said Jade thoughtfully, nodding, "Yeah, I always had a thing for him. So where's your mom in all this?" "She's dead," I said in a dramatic, bleak voice, and for the first time, enjoyed their astonished silence.

They took me to purple-walled, zebra-couched Conscience, located in downtown Stockton across from the public library, where Jaire of the alligator boots (pronounced "jay-REE") gave me copper highlights and cut my hair so it no longer looked "like she did it herself with a pair of toenail scissors." To my surprise, Jade insisted my new grooming initiative was complimentary, care of her mother, Jefferson, who'd left Jade her black American Express card "in case of Emergency" before disappearing for six weeks in Aspen with her new "hottie," a ski instructor "named Tanner with permanently chapped lips." "I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can do something with those broom-bangs," Jade instructed my hairdresser. Also funded by Jefferson, over the next two weeks, was my six-month supply of disposable contact lenses procured from ophthalmologist Stephen J. Henshaw, MD, with eyes like an Arctic Fox's and a bad head cold, as well as clothes, shoes and undergarments hand-selected for me by Jade and Lu not from the Adolescent Department of Stickley's, but at Vanity Fair Bodiwear on Main Street, at Rouge Boutique on Elm, at Natalia's on Cherry, even at Frederick's of Hollywood ("If you ever decide to get kinky, I suggest this for the occasion," Jade instructed, thrusting something at me that resembled the harness one dons before skydiving, only in pink). The final coups de grâce to my previous dull appearance were moisturizing makeups, the thyme and myrtle lip shimmers, the day (shiny) and evening (murky) eye shadows exhumed especially for my skin tone from Stickley's cosmetics main floor, as well as the fifteen-minute application tutorial by gum-chewing Millicent with her powdery forehead and spotless lab coat. (She artfully crammed the entire white light color spectrum onto both of my eyelids.)

114 MÀRISHA PESSL "You are a goddess," Lu said, smiling at me in Millicent's hand mirror. "Who would've thought," cracked Jade. I was no longer apologetically owl-like, but impenitently pastrylike (Visual Aid 9.0).

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SPECIAL TOPICS ]N CALAMITY PHYSICS 115 Dad, of course, witnessing this transformation, felt the way Van Gogh would probably feel, if, one hot afternoon, he happened to wander into a Sarasota Gift Shoppe and found next to the cardboard baseball caps and Fun-in-the-Sun seashell figurines, his beloved sunflowers printed on one side of two-hundred beach towels on SALE for just $9.99. "Your hair appears to blaze, sweet. Hair is not supposed to blaze. Fires are supposed to blaze, illuminated clock towers, lighthouses, Hell perhaps. Not human hair." Soon, however, rather miraculously, apart from the odd gripe or humph, most of his indignation subsided. I assumed it had to do with his absorption with Kitty, or, as she called herself on our answering machine, "Kitty Cat." (I hadn't met her, but had heard the latest headlines: "Kitty Swoons in Italian Restaurant Due to Dad's Musings on Human Nature," "Kitty Begs Dad's Forgiveness for Spilling Her White Russian on Cuff of His Irish Tweed," "Kitty Plans Her Fortieth Birthday and Hints at Wedding Bells.") It was bizarre, but Dad appeared to have accepted the fact that his work of art had been shamelessly commercialized. He even seemed to harbor no ill will. "You're satisfied? You're responsible? You respect the youths in this Ulysses Study Group, which unsurprisingly, spend more time roaming the mall and bleaching their hair than tracking the whereabouts of Stephen Dedalus?" (No, I never quite disabused Dad of the idea that I spent Sunday afternoons trying to scale that Himalayan tome. Thankfully, Dad had no real taste for Joyce—excessive wordplay bored him, so did Latin—but in order to avoid even the most basic questioning, I told him periodically that due to the weak constitutions of others, we were still unable to make it past Base Camp, Chapter 1, "Telemachus.") "They're actually pretty sharp," I said. "Just the other day, one of them used 'obsequious' in conversation." "Don't be cheeky. They're thinkers?" "Yes." "Not lemmings? Not leg warmers? Not nitwits, net-heads, neo-Nazis? Not anarchists or antichrists? Not pedestrian youths who believe they're the first people on earth to be mizundahstood? Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam — " "Dad. It's fine." "You're positive? Never rely on intoxicating surfaces." "Yes."

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"I'll accept it then." He frowned as I stood on my tiptoes to kiss his rough cheek. I made my way to the front door. It was Sunday and Jade was resting her elbow on the car horn. "Have a swell time with your chicks and charlies," he said and sighed a little theatrically, though I ignored him. " 'If others have their will, Ann hath a way.' "

There were a handful of occasions when Jade, Lu and I screeched with laughter over something, like the one time they invited me "mall slumming" and a crew of chickenheads with their boxers on display trailed us with stupid smiles around Blue Crest Mall ("Serious mafuglies—just as I suspected," Jade said, surveying them through a rack of scrunchies at Earringz N' Thingz) or when Jade debated the mysterious dimensions of Nigel's candlestick ("Given his shortness, it could be powerful, it could be pygmy"; "Oh, God," said Lu slapping a hand to her mouth) or driving to Hannah's, the time Jade and I flipped off a scab (her word for any "forty-plus hideous male") who had the gall to drive a meandering Volkswagen in front of her. (Following her lead, I unrolled the window to stick my hand out and my hair—now a fascinating Bornite color, Atomic number 29—thrashed in the wind.) During such moments, I thought to myself, maybe these were my friends, maybe I'd confide in them about sex over rhubarb pie in a diner at 3:00 A.M. and someday we'd phone each other to chat about Tuskawalla Trails Retirement Community and back pain and our turtle-bald husbands, but then their smiles fell off their faces like Visual Aids on bulletin boards missing a tack. They'd look at me irritably, as if I'd tricked them. They drove me home. I'd sit in the backseat doing my best to lip-read due to the ear-splitting levels of the heavy-metal CD (I decoded agonizingly shadowy phrases: "meet us later," "hot-ass date"), knowing full well because I hadn't said anything breathtaking (because I was about as cool as Bermuda shorts), they'd drop me like laundry and accelerate into the whispery night with its plum sky and black mountains snooping over the spiked tops of the pine trees. At an undisclosed location, they'd join Charles, Nigel and Black (what they called Milton), and probably park and neck, and race cars off cliffs (don leather jackets emblazoned with T-BIRD or PINK LADY). "Astalowaygo," Jade said to my general vicinity as she smeared on red lipstick in the rearview mirror. I slammed the car door, heaved my backpack onto my shoulder.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 117 Leulah waved. "See you Sunday," she said sweetly. I trudged inside, the veteran who wished war had lasted longer.

"What on earth did you find compulsory to purchase at a store called Bahama-Me-Tan?" shouted Dad from the kitchen when he returned from his date with Kitty. He appeared in the doorway of the living room with the orange plastic shopping bag I'd thrown on the foyer floor, holding it as if it were the carcass of a hedgehog. "Bali-Me Bronzer," I said drearily without looking up from some book I'd yanked off the shelf, The South American Joven Mutiny (Gonzalez, 1989). Dad nodded and wisely decided not to probe further. There was a turning point. (And I'm sure it had everything to do with Hannah, although her role, what she must have said to them—an ultimatum perhaps, a bribe or one of her suggestions—was never clear.) It was the first week of October, on a Friday, during sixth period. It was a harsh, bright day for fall, glaring as a washed car, and Mr. Moats, my instructor for Beginning Drawing, had entreated the class to go outside with our No. 2 pencils and sketch —"Find your melting clocks!" he'd ordered, swooshing open the door as if freeing mustangs, his other hand O/éing in the air so for four seconds he was a Flamenco dancer in tight pants of Cadmium Green. Slowly, lazily, the class floated out across the campus with their giant sketch pads. I found it tricky to choose what to draw, and wandered for fifteen minutes before deciding upon a faded package of M&Ms hiding in a bed of pine needles behind Elton. I was sitting on the cement wall, drawing my first few wimpy lines, when I heard someone traipsing down the sidewalk. Instead of passing me, the person stopped. "Hey, there," he said. It was Milton. His hands were stuffed in his pockets and his stringy hair mumbo-jumboed over his forehead. "Hi," I said, but he didn't answer or even smile. He simply stepped over to my sketchpad and tilted his head to inspect my rickety pencil lines like a teacher looming over your shoulder, blithely helping himself to what you scribbled during an Essay Test. "What're you doing out of class?" I asked. "Oh, I'm sick," he said, smiling. "Flu. Goin' to the infirmary, then home to rest." I should mention: while Charles was the obvious Cassanova at St. Gallway, popular among chicks, charlie-boys and cheerleaders, Milton, I'd learned, was sort of the Studhorse for the smart and strange. A girl in AP

118 MÀR1SHA PESSL English, Macon Campins, who drew henna-style swirling designs in permanent ink on her palms, claimed to be obsessively in love with him, and before the bell, before flustered Ms. Simpson shuffled into the room muttering in escalating whispers—"no toner, nothing but legal paper, no staples, everything in this school, no, this country, no, the world, all going to seed"—you could hear Macon discussing Milton's mystery tattoo with her best friend, Engella Grand: "I think he did it himself. See, I was staring at his rolled-up sleeve in Biology? And I'm pretty sure it's a huge freakin' oil slick on his arm. That's sooo sexy." I, too, felt there was something undercover and sexual about Milton, which made me act sort of inebriated whenever I was alone with him. I was once rinsing plates, loading them into Hannah's dishwasher when he came in with seven water glasses in his giant hands and, as he leaned past me to put them in the sink, my chin accidentally touched his shoulder. It was damp and muggy as a greenhouse and I thought I was going to fall down. "Sorry, Blue," he said when he stepped away. Whenever he said my name, which he did often (so often, I felt it came tantalizingly close to satire), his accent yo-yoed it, or else, turned it into a piece of elastic. Bluuue. "Got plans tonight, Blue?" he asked me now. "Yes," I said, though my response didn't seem to register. (I think they'd figured by now, unless Hannah had actively arranged a suitor, no one came calling—not an outrageous assumption.) "Well, we're hangin' at Jade's tonight if you want to come. I'll get her to pick you up. Should be mad crazy. If you can handle it." He continued past me, down the sidewalk. "I thought you had the flu," I said under my breath, but he heard me, because he turned and, walking backward, winked at me, saying: "Feelin' better by the minute." He then began to whistle and, tightening his green-and-blue plaid tie as if about to interview for a job, he swung open the back doors of Elton and disappeared inside.

Jade lived in a thirty-five-room Tara-inspired McMansion (what she called the Wedding Cake) built atop a hill in a hick town "sprinkled with trailer parks and people without molars" known as Junk Spread (pop. 109). "The house is vulgar when you see it for the first time," she said cheer-

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 119 fully, swinging open the massive front door. (From the moment Jade had picked me up, her spirits had approached Gzc/gef-like gladness, which made me wonder what kind of stellar deal she'd cut with Hannah; it had to have had something to do with immortality.) "Yeah," she said, fixing the front of her black-and-white silk wrap dress so her electric yellow bra didn't show. "I made the suggestion to Jefferson that she have on hand some of those airplane sick bags, you know, right when you first walk in. She hasn't gotten them yet. Oh, and no you're not hallucinating. That really is Cassiopeia. Ursa Minor's in the dining room, Hercules in the kitchen. Jefferson dreamed it up, constellations of the Northern Hemisphere on all the ceilings. She was dating this guy Timber, an Astrologist and Dream Translator, when they were designing the house, and by the time Timber unloaded her and she was going out with Gibbs from England who hated the idea of all the fucking twinkling lights—'How the devil will you change those bulbs?' — it was too late. The electricians had already done Corona Borealis and half of Pegasus." The foyer was white-on-white-on-white with a slick marble floor on which one could probably triple-lutz and double-toe-loop with little difficulty. I stared up at what really was Cassiopeia twinkling above us in the pale blue ceiling, which also seemed to hum that acid note of Frozen Food sections. It was freezing too. "No, you're not coming down with something. Living in cool temperatures stalls, sometimes even reverses the aging process so Jefferson doesn't allow the thermostat in the house to get above forty." Jade flung the car keys onto the massive Corinthian column by the door, messy with change, toenail clippers, brochures for meditation classes at something called The Suwanee Centre for Inner Life. "Don't know about you, but I'm in dire need of a cocktail. Nobody's here yet, they're late, the motherfuckers, so I'll show you around." Jade made us mudslingers, the first alcoholic drink I'd ever had; it was sweet yet fascinatingly throat scalding. We embarked on the Grand Tour. The house was ornate and filthy as a flophouse. Under the pulsing constellations (many of them with extinguished stars, supernovas, white dwarfs) almost every room looked confused, in spite of the very explicit title Jade gave it (Rec Room, Museum Room, Drawing Room). For example, the Imperial Room displayed an ornate Persian vahze and some large oily portrait of an "eighteenthcentury Sir Somebodyorother"; but also a stained silk blouse over a sofa arm,

120 MAR1SHA PESSL a sneaker capsized under a stool, and on a gilded end table, gruesome cotton balls huddled together in miserable commiseration after having removed blood-red polish from somebody's nails. She took me to the TV Room ("three thousand channels and nothing on"), the Toy Room with a life-sized rearing carousel horse ("That's Snowpea") and the Shanghai Room, empty, apart from a big bronze Buddha statue and ten or twelve cardboard boxes. "Hannah really likes it if we get rid of as much material possession as possible. I take stuff to Goodwill all the time. You should think about doing the same," she said. In the basement, under Gemini, was the Jefferson Room ("where my mother pays ohmage to her heyday"). It was a 1600-square-foot family room with a Drive-in-sized TV, carpeting the color of spareribs and wooden walls lined with thirty advertisements for brands like "Ohh!" Perfume, Slinky Silk™ Pantyhose, Keep Walkin' Bootwear, Orange Bliss Lite® and other obscure products. Each featured the same carrot-topped woman flashing a banana-grin that walked the fine line between ecstatic and fanatic (see Chapter 4, "Jim Jones," Don Juan de Mania, Lerner, 1963). "That's my mom, Jefferson. You can call her Jeff." Jade frowned as she surveyed one of the ads for Vita Vitamins in which Jeff, sporting blue terry-cloth wristbands, did a jackknife over VITA VITAMIN YOUR WAY TO A BETTER LIFE.

"She was big in New York in 1978 for two minutes. See here, how her hair curves way up over, then ends right there above her eye? Well, she invented that hairstyle. When she came out with it everyone went bonkers. It was called The Crimson Marshmallow. She was also friends with Andy Warhol. I guess he let her see him without his wig all the time. Oh, wait." She walked to the table beneath the Sir Albert's Spicy Sausages ads ("If it's good enough for royals, it's good enough for you.") returning with a framed photograph of Jefferson, apparently in the present day. "This is her last year posing for her Christmas cards." The woman had wandered deep into her forties and, to her evident panic, had been unable to make her way back. She still flashed the bananasmile, though it'd gone mushy on the ends, and her hair no longer had enough kinetic energy to swing itself up into The Crimson Marshmallow, but frizzled stiffly off her head in a Red Zinger Silo. (If Dad saw her he would not hesitate to call her "a badly aged Barbarella." Or he'd use one of his Stale Candy remarks reserved for women who spent the greater portion of their week attempting to halt Middle Age as if Middle Age was nothing but a

SPECIAL TOPICS m CALAMITY PHYSICS 1 2 1 team of runaway stallions: "a melted red M&M," a "stale strawberry Sweet Tart.") Jade was looking at me intently, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. "She looks very nice," I said. "About as nice as Hitler." After the tour, we retreated to the Purple Room, "where Jefferson gets to really know her boyfriends if you know what I mean. Avoid the paisley couch by the fireplace." The others still hadn't arrived, and after Jade busied herself with making more mudslingers and turning over the Louis Armstrong record on the antique gramophone, she finally sat down, though her eyes flew around the room like canaries. She checked her watch a fourth time, then a fifth. "How long have you lived here?" I asked, because I sort of wished we'd get along so when the others arrived we were performing our favorite number, "Just Two Little Girls from Little Rock," Jade, a skinnier, angrier Marilyn to my unquestionably-more-flat-chested Jane Russell. But, much to my own disappointment, the odds didn't look good for being bosom buddies. "Three years," she said distractedly. "Oh, where the fuck are they? I loathe when people are late and Black swore he'd be here by seven, the fraud" she complained not to me, but the ceiling. "I'll castrate him." (Orion, the constellation under which we sat, had not had his light bulbs changed and thus he'd lost his legs and head. He was nothing but a belt.) Soon the others arrived wearing quirky accessories (plastic bead necklaces, fast-food crowns; Charles wore an old fencing shirt, Milton a blazer in navy velveteen) and they stormed the room, Nigel crawling over the leather couch, hitching his legs on the coffee table, Leulah air-kissing Jade hellos. She only smiled at me, then glided to the bar, her eyes glassy and red. Milton wandered toward a wooden box on the writing desk in the corner and unlatched it, removing a cigar. "Jadey, where's the cutter?" he asked, sniffing it. She dragged on her cigarette and glared at him. "You said you'd be on time and you're late. I'll hate you until I die. Top drawer." He chuckled, a muffled sound, as if he was being smothered with a pillow, and I realized I wanted him to say something to me—"Glad you could join us," "Hey, Bluuue"—but he didn't. He didn't see me. "Blue, how about a dirty martini?" Leulah asked. "Or something else," said Jade. "A Shirley Temple," suggested Nigel with a smirk. "A cosmo?" asked Leulah.

122 MARVoU PESSL "There's milk in the fridge/' Nigel said, deadpan. "A—a dirty martini would be quite nice. Thank you," I said. "Three olives, please." Three Olives, Please: it was what Eleanor Curd specified, the emerald-eyed heroine that caused men to shudder with hungry desire in A Return to Waterfalls (DeMurgh, 1990), pilfered from June Bug Rita Cleary's gold leather purse when I was twelve. ("Where's my book?" she repeated to Dad for days like a woman with mental illness who'd wandered away from her sanitarium. She searched our every couch, rug and closet, at times on her hands and knees, frantic to find out if Eleanor ended up with Sir Damien or they stayed apart because he believed she believed he believed he'd impregnated a vicious tattletale with an illegitimate child.) As soon as Leulah handed me my martini, I was forgotten like Line 2 on a Corporate Headquarters Switchboard. "So Hannah had a date tonight," Nigel said. "No, she didn't," said Charles, smiling, though he sat up imperceptibly as if he'd felt the prick of a needle in his seat cushion. "She did," said Nigel. "I saw her after school. She was wearing red." "Oh, boy," said Jade exhaling cigarette smoke. They talked on and on about Hannah; Jade again said something about Goodwill and "bourgeois pigs," words that startled me (I hadn't heard the phrase since Dad and I, driving across Illinois, read Angus Hubbard's Acid Trips: The Delusions of 60s Counterculture [1989]) though I didn't know who or what she was referring to, because I found it impossible to focus on the conversation; it was like that cruel little blurry line at the bottom of an eye chart. And I didn't feel like myself. I was a swirl of Interstellar Material, a mist of Dark Matter, a case in point of General Relativity. I stood up and tried to make my way to the door, but my legs felt as if they were being asked to measure the universe. u ]esus" said Jade from somewhere. "What's wrong with her?" The floor was transmitting in a wide array of wavelengths. "What'd you give her to drink?" Milton asked. "Nothing. A mudslinger." "Told you to give her milk," Nigel said. "I gave her a martini," added Leulah. Suddenly I was on the floor, gazing at the stars. "Is she going to die?" asked Jade. "We should take her to the hospital," Charles said. "Or call Hannah," said Lu.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 123 "She's fine." Milton was leaning over me. His tendriled black hair resembled squid. "Let her sleep it off." A tidal wave of nausea was starting to flood my stomach and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It was like the black seawater overtaking a crimson Titanic stateroom, as recounted in one of Dad's favorite autobiographies of all time, the gripping eyewitness account Black in My Mind, Yellow in My Legs (1943) by Herbert J. D. Lascowitz, who finally, in his ninety-seventh year, came clean about his Machiavellian behavior aboard the legendary ocean liner, admitting he strangled an unidentified woman, stripped her body, donned her clothes in order to pretend he was a woman with child, thereby securing a choice spot for himself on one of two remaining lifeboats. I tried to roll over and stand, but the carpet and the couch swerved upward and then, as shocking as lightning striking inches from my shoes, I was sick: cartoonishly sick all over the table and the carpet and the paisley couch by the fireplace and Jade's black leather Dior sandals, even on the coffee-table book, Thank God for the Telephoto Lens: Backyard Photos of the Stars (Miller, 2002). There were also small but identifiable splatters on the cuffs of Nigel's pants. They stared at me. And this, I am ashamed to say, is where memory abruptly drops off (see Figure 12, "Continental Shelf Cliff," Oceanic Terrain, Boss, 1977)- I can recall only a few flimsy sentences ("What if her family presses charges?"), faces peering down at me as if I'd tumbled down a well. Yet I don't really need a memory here, because that Sunday at Hannah's, when they were calling me Gag, Retch, Hurl and Olives, they each went to great lengths to give me their eyewitness account of what happened. According to Leulah, I passed out on the South Lawn. Jade claimed I'd muttered a phrase in Spanish, something along the lines of "E/ perro que no camina, no encuentra hueso," or "The dog that doesn't walk, doesn't find a bone," and then my eyes rolled into the back of my head and she thought I'd died. Milton said I got "nekkid." Nigel claimed I "partied like Tommy Lee during the Theater of Pain tour." Charles rolled his eyes when hearing these versions, these "gross distortions of the truth." He said I walked up to Jade and she and I began to make out in flawless reenactment of his favorite film, the cult masterpiece of French fetishist director, Luc-Shallot de la Nuit, Les Salopes Vampires et Lesbiennes de Cherbourg (Petit Oiseau Prod., 1971). "Guys spend whole lives wishing to see that kind of thing, so thank you, Retch. Thank you."

124 UAKVÔU PESSL "Sounds like you really enjoyed yourselves," Hannah said with a smile, her eyes glistening as she sipped her wine. "Don't tell me any more. It's not fit for a teacher's ears." I could never decide which version I believed.

It was after I had a nickname that everything changed. Dad said my mother, the woman who "left people holding their breaths in awe when she entered a room," always acted the same no matter who she talked to or where she was, and sometimes Dad couldn't tell when she answered the phone, if she was talking to "her childhood best friend from New York or a telemarketer, because she was so thrilled to hear from both." " 'Believe me, I'd be overjoyed to schedule a carpet cleaning—your product is obviously terrific—but I have to be honest, we don't actually have any carpets.' She could go on and on with apologies for hours," Dad said. And I let her down, because I'll admit, I did act differently now that I was friends with them, now that Milton, immediately following Morning Announcements shouted "Retch!" and the entire courtyard of students looked ready to Stop, Drop and Roll. Not that overnight I morphed into, a tyrannical foulmouthed girl who'd started out in Chorus, and managed to claw her way to the Lead. But, strolling through first-floor Hanover with Jade Whitestone between third and fourth periods ("I'm bushed," Jade would sigh, hitching her elbow around my neck the way Gene Kelly does to a lamppost in Singin in the Rain) was an unforgivably paparazzi moment; I thought I understood, completely, what Hammond Brown, the actor in the 1928 Broadway hit Happy Streets (known throughout the Roaring Twenties simply as The Chin) meant when he said "a crowd's eyes have a touch like silk" (Ovation, 1952, p. 269). And at the end of the school day, when Dad picked me up and we fought about something, like my "tinseled" hair or a new slightly edgier essay I'd written —"Tupac: Portrait of a Modern Romantic Poet," on which I received a derisory B ("Your senior year of high school is not the time to suddenly become alternative, hip and cool.")—afterward, it was strange; before my friendship with the Bluebloods, after an argument with Dad, when I retreated to my room I'd always felt like a smudge; I couldn't perceive where I began and where I ended. But now, I felt as if I could still see myself, my outline—a thin, but perfectly respectable black line. Ms. Gershon of AP Physics perceived the change too, if solely on the subconscious level. For example, when I first arrived at St. Gallway, when-

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 125 ever I raised my hand to ask a question in her class, she couldn't immediately make me out; I blended effortlessly with the lab tables, the windows, the poster of James Joule. Now, I only had to hold my hand up for three, maybe four seconds before her eyes snapped to me: "Yes, Blue?" It was the same with Mr. Archer—all delusions he'd entertained about my name were gone. "Blue," he said, not with shakiness or unease, but supreme faith (similar to the tone he used for Da Vinci). And Mr. Moats, when he wandered over to my easel to inspect my Figure Drawing, his eyes almost always veered away from the drawing to my head, as if I were more worthy of scrutiny than a few wobbly lines on a page. Sal Mineo noticed the difference too, and if he noticed, it had to be Agonizingly True. "You should be careful," he said to me during Morning Announcements. I glanced over at his intricate wrought-iron profile, his soggy brown eyes. "I'm happy for you," he said, looking not at me but at the stage where Havermeyer, Eva Brewster and Hilary Leech were unveiling the new look of The Gallway Gazette: "A colored front page, advertisements," Eva was saying. Sal swallowed and his Adam's apple, which pushed against his neck like a metal coil in an old couch, trembled, rose and fell. "But they only hurt people." "What are you talking about?" I asked, irritated by his ambiguity, but he didn't answer, and when Evita dismissed the school to class, he flew out of the aisle, quick as a wren off a lamppost.

The twins in my second period Study Hall, the Great Social Commentators of the Age, Eliaya and Georgia Hatchett (Nigel and Jade, who had them in a Spanish class, called them Dee for Tweedledee and Dum for Tweedledum, respectively) naturally had all kinds of dirt on my association with the Bluebloods. Before, they'd always gossiped messily about Jade and the others, their slurpy voices splattering all over each other and everyone else, but now they sat in the back, next to the water fountain and Hambone Reading Recommendations, carrying on in crackly, roast-potato whispers. I ignored them for the most part, even when the words blue and Shhh, she'll hear you, hissed over to me like a couple of Gaboon Vipers. But when I didn't have any homework to do, I asked Mr. Fletcher if I could be excused to the restroom and slipped into row 500 and then the densest section of row 900, Biography, where I repositioned some of the larger books from row 600 to the holes between the shelves, in order to avoid detection. (Librarian

126 IOR1SHÀ PESSL Hambone, if you're reading this, I apologize for the biweekly repositioning of H. Gibbons' bulky African Wildlife [1989] from its proper place in the 650s to just above Mommie Dearest [Crawford, 1978] and Notorious: My Years with Cary Grant [Drake, 1989]. You weren't going mad.) "So do you or don't you want to hear the icing, the cake, the double whammy, the Crown Jewel, the Jewel après orthodontia, the Madonna abs après hatha yoga"—she took a swift breath, swallowed—"the Ted Danson après hair plugs, the J-Lo avant Gigli, the Ben avant J-Lo but après psychiatric treatment for gambling, the Matt après—" "You think you're like a blind bard and all?" asked Dum, glancing up from Celebrastory Weekly. "I don't think so." "Okay, so Elena Topolos." "Elena Topolos?" "Mediterranean freshman who needs to wax that lip. She told me the blue person's some weird autistic savant. Not only that, but we lost a man to her." "What?" "Hard Body. He's neurotic for her. It's already myth. Everyone on the soccer team calls him Aphrodite and he doesn't even care. He and the blue person have a class together and someone saw him digging through the garbage can to find a paper she threw away because she'd touched it." "Whatever." "He's asking her to Christmas formal." "WHAT?" shrieked Dee. Mr. Fletcher looked up from The Crossword Fanatic's True Challenge (Albo, 2002) and fired a disapproving glace at Dee and Dum. They were unfazed. "Formal's like three months away," Dee said, wincing. "That's all a holy war in high school. People get pregnant, caught with pot, get a bad haircut so you find out it was their only decent feature and they have awful ears. It's way too soon to ask. Is he out of his mind?" Dee nodded. "He's that haunted. His ex, Lonny, is pissed. She vows she's gonna jihad her ass by the end of the year." "Ouch."

Dad was fond of pointing out the rule of thumb that "at times, even fools are right," but I was still surprised when, a day later, as I collected books from

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 127 my locker, I noticed a kid from my AP Physics class passing me not once, but three times, faux-frowning at some giant hardback open in his hands, which I realized the second time he passed was our class textbook, Fundamentals of Physics (Rarreh & Cherish, 2004). I assumed he was waiting for Allison Vaughn, the sedate yet mildly popular senior with a locker near mine who wandered around with a wan smile and polite hair, but when I slammed my locker door, he was behind me. "Hi," he said. T m Zach." "Blue." I spasm-swallowed. He was a tall, tan, supremely American-looking kid: square chin, big straight teeth, eyes an absurd Jacuzzi blue. I knew, vaguely, based on chatter during labs, he was shy, a little bit funny (my partner, Krista, was forever neglecting our experiment to giggle at something he said), also captain of the soccer team. His lab partner was his supposed ex-girlfriend, Lonny, cocaptain of Gallway Spirit, a girl with soggy platinum hair, a fake tan and a marked tendency to break the equipment. No cloud chamber, potentiometer, friction rod or alligator clip was safe with her. On Mondays, when the class wrote up our results on the dry-erase board, our teacher, Ms. Gershon, consistently threw out Lonny and Zach's findings, as they always flew daringly in the face of Modern Science, discrediting Planck's constant, undermining Boyle's law, amending the theory of relativity from E=mc2 to E=mc5. According to Dee and Dum, Lonny and Zach had gone out since sixth grade, and for the past few years had partaken in something called "lion sex" every Saturday night in the "hineymooner's suite," Room 222 at the Dynasty Motel on Pike Avenue. He was handsome, sure, but as Dad once said, there were people who'd completely missed their decade, were born at the wrong time—not in the intellectually gifted sense, but due to a certain look on their face more suitable to the Victorian Age than, say, the Me Decade. Well, this kid was some twenty years too late. He was the one with thick brown hair that flyingsaucered over an eye, the one who inspired girls to make their own prom dress, the one from the country club. And maybe he had a secret diamond earring, maybe a sequin glove, maybe he even had a good song at the end with three helpings of keyboard synthesizer, but no one would know, because if you weren't born in your decade you never made it to the ending, you floated around in your middle, unresolved, in oblivion, confused and unrealized. (Pour some sugar on him and blame it on the rain.) "I was kinda hoping you could help me out with something," he said, contemplating his shoes. "I have a serious problem."

128 MÂRISHA PESSL I felt irrationally frightened. "What?" "There's a girl. . ." He sighed, hooked his thumbs through his belt loops. "I like her. Yeah. I really do." He was doing an embarrassed thing with his head, chin down, eyes sticking to me. "I've never talked to her. Never said a word. And normally this wouldn't throw me —normally, I'd go right up to her, ask her for pizza . . . movie . . . yeah. But this one. She throws me." He ran his right hand through his hair and it was absurdly knot free like a shampoo commercial. His left hand was still cradling our Physics textbook, bookmarking, for some bizarre reason p. 123, which featured a sizeable diagram of a magenta Plasma Ball. I was able to make out, upsidedown, around the crook of his arm: "Plasma is the fourth state of matter." "So I say to myself, fine," he said with a shrug. "It's not meant to be. 'Cause if you don't feel comfortable talking to someone, how're you gonna handle . . . well, you have to trust the person, right, or what's the point. But then" —frowning, he gazed all the way down the hall toward the EXIT—"it's like every time I see her I feel... I feel. . ." I didn't think he was going to continue, but then he broke into a smile. "Fucking. Great." The smile was pinned to his face, delicate as a prom corsage. It was my turn to speak. Words were in my throat—advice, council, some pithy line from a screwball comedy—but they were grinding together, disappearing fast like celery in a sink disposal. " I . . . " I began. I could feel his minty breath on my forehead, and he was staring at me with his eyes the color of a kiddy pool (blue, green, suspicious hints of yellow). He was searching my face as if he took me to be a cruddy masterpiece in somebody's attic and if he scrutinized my deft use of color and shading as well as the direction of my brushstrokes, he'd figure out who my artist was. "Hurl?" I turned. Nigel was inching his way toward us, visibly amused. "I really can't help you, so if you'd be so kind as to excuse me," I blurted quickly, then darted past his shoulder and the Physics textbook. I didn't turn around, not even when I reached Nigel and the German Language Bulletin Board and then the EXIT. I assumed he stood in the hall staring after me with his mouth open like a newscaster reading Breaking News when the teleprompter goes dead. "What'd the Chippendale want?" Nigel asked as we headed downstairs. I shrugged. "Who knows. I-I couldn't really follow his logic."

SPECIAL TOPICS IK CALAMITY PHYSICS 129 "Oh, you're terrible." Nigel laughed, a quick, skidding sound, then linked his arm through mine. We were Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion. Obviously, a few short months ago, I would have been astounded, maybe even knock-kneed that the El Dorado rode over to me and made a long speech about A Girl. ("All of history comes down to a girl," Dad said with a hint of regret as we watched The Dark Prince, the award-winning documentary on Hitler's youth.) In the past, I had all sorts of Hidden Desire moments when I gazed at El Dorados riding through the hushed corridors, the empty football fields of a lonesome school—like old Howie Easton at Clearwood Day with the cleft chin and gap in his teeth making him such a sophisticated whistler he could've whistled Wagner's entire Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848-74) if he'd wanted to (he didn't want to)—and I'd wished, just once, I might ride into the wilderness with them, that I, not Kaytee Jones with the Hawaiian eyes nor Priscilla Pastor Owensby with legs as long as highways, could be their favorite Appaloosa. But now things were different. Now I had copper hair and sticky, myrtle lips, and as Jade said that Sunday dinner at Hannah's: "The Zach Soderbergs of the world are cute, sure, but they're boring as Saltines. Okay—you hope if you scratch one you'll find Luke Wilson. Even Johnny Depp with his clothing missteps at major award ceremonies you'd be happy with. But trust me, all you get is bland cracker." "Who's this?" asked Hannah. "Some kid in my physics class," I said. "He's a pretty popular senior," said Lu. "You should see his rug," Nigel said. "I think he has hair plugs." "Well, he's barking up the wrong tree," Jade said. "Retch is already in a puddle over someone." She gazed triumphantly at Milton, but to my relief, he was cutting into his Danish roasted chicken with sunflower seasoning and hash of sweet potato and didn't see her. "So Blue's breaking hearts," Hannah said and winked at me. "It's about time."

I did wonder about Hannah. And I felt guilty wondering about her, because the others trusted her in the uncomplicated way an old horse accepts a rider, a child grabs an outstretched hand to cross the street.

130 MÂR1SHA PESSL Yet immediately following my attempt to Parent Trap her with Dad, sometimes at her house, I'd find myself falling out of the dinner conversation. I'd look around the room as if I was a snooping stranger outside, pressing my nose to the window. I wondered why she took so much interest in my life, my happiness, my haircut ("Ac/orable," she said. "You look like a dispossessed flapper," Dad said); why, for that matter, any of them were of interest to her. I wondered about her adult friends, why she hadn't married or done any of the things Dad referred to as "domesticated hooey" (SUVs, kids), the "sitcom script people stick to as they hope for meaning in their canned-laughter lives." In her house, there were no photographs. At school, I never once saw her conversing with other teachers apart from Eva Brewster, and only then on a single occasion. As much as I adored her—particularly those moments she let herself be silly, when a favorite song came on and she did a funny little jig with her wineglass in her bare feet in the middle of the living room and the dogs stared at her the way fans stared at Janis Joplin singing "Bobby McGee" ("I was in a band once," Hannah said shyly, biting her lip. "Lead singer. I dyed my hair red.")—I couldn't overlook a certain book by leading neurophysicist and criminologist Donald McMather MD, Social Behaviors and Nimbus Clouds (1998). "An adult with a fastidious interest in those considerably younger than him or herself can not be completely sincere or even rational," he writes on p. 424, Chapter 22, "The Allure of Children." "Such a preoccupation often hides something very dark."

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air at Styles 'd been in thick with the Bluebloods three, maybe four weeks, when Jade invaded, Sherman-style, my nonexistent sex life. ,L Not that I took her assault too seriously. When it came down to the nitty-gritty, I knew I'd probably flee without warning, like Hannibal's elephants during the Battle of Zama in 202 B.c. (I was twelve when Dad wordlessly presented me with various tomes to read and reflect upon, including C. Allen's Shame Culture and the Shadow World [1993], Somewhere Between Puritans and Brazil: How to Have a Healthy Sexuality [Mier, 1990], also Paul D. Russell's terrifying What You Dont Know About White Slavery [1996].) "You've never gotten laid, have you, Retch?" Jade accused one night, deliberately ashing her cigarette in the cracked blue vahze next to her like some movie psychiatrist with switchblade fingernails, her eyes narrowed, as if hoping I'd confess to violent crime. The question hung in the air like a national flag with no wind. It was obvious the Bluebloods, including Nigel and Lu, approached sex as if it were cute little towns they had to whizz through in order to make good time on their way to Somewhere (and I wasn't so sure they knew their final destination). Immediately, Andreo Verduga flashed into my head (shirtless, trimming shrubs) and I wondered if I could speedily make up a steamy experience involving the bed of his pickup truck (propped up against mulch, rolling onto tulip bulbs, hair snagging the lawnmower) but prudently decided against it. "Virgins advertise their stunning lack of insight and expertise with the subtlety and panache of Bible salesmen," wrote British comic Brinkly Starnes in A Harlequin Romance (1989).

132 MARISHA PESSL Jade nodded knowingly at my silence. "We'll have to do something about it then," she said, sighing. After this painful revelation, on Friday nights, after I got clearance from Dad to spend the night at her house ("And this Jade individual—she's one of your Joycean aficionados?"), Jade, Leulah and I, decked out in Jefferson's Studio 54 prom getup, drove an hour to a roadside bar in Redville, just over the South Carolina border. It was called the Blind Horse Saloon (or lin ors loon, as the sign whispered in dying pink neon), a grouchy place Jade claimed the five of them had been frequenting for "years," which, from the outside looked like a burnt loaf of pound cake (rectangular, black, no windows) stranded in an expanse of stale-cookie pavement. Armed with farcically fake IDs (I was brown-eyed Roxanne Kaye Loomis, twenty-two, five-feet-seven, a Virgo organ donor; I attended Clemson with a major in Chemical Engineering; "Always say you're seriously into engineering," Jade instructed. "People don't know what it is and they won't ask because it sounds mind-numbing."), we edged past the bouncer, a large black man who stared at us as if we were cast members of Disney on Ice who'd forgotten to remove our costumes. Inside, the place was stuffed with country music and middle-aged men in plaid shirts clutching their beers like handrails. Most of them stared openmouthed at four televisions suspended from the ceiling broadcasting some baseball game or local news. Women, standing in tight circles, fiddled with their hair as they talked, as if putting finishing touches on a sagging flower arrangement. They always glared at us, particularly Jade (see "Snarling Coon Dogs," Appalachian Living, Hester, 1974, p. 32). "Now we find Blue's lucky man," Jade announced, her eyes creeping all over the room, past the linebacker jukebox, the bartender pouring shots with a strange brawny energy, as if he were a GI who'd just arrived in Saigon, and the wooden benches along the far wall where girls waited with foreheads so hot and oily you could fry eggs on them. "I don't see any melted Milk Duds," I said. "Maybe you should hold out for true love," Leulah said. "Or Milton." It was a running joke between Jade and Lu that I "had it bad for Black," that I desperately wanted to be "Black and Blue," make "the beast with two Blacks," and so on—allegations I refused to admit to (even though they were true). "Haven't you heard the expression, 'Don't shit where you eat?' " Jade said. "God, you people have no faith. There. The cute one at the end of the

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 133 bar talking to that malaria mosquito. He's wearing tortoiseshell glasses. Know what tortoiseshell glasses mean?" "No," I said. "Stop pulling down your dress, it makes you look five. It means he's intellectual. You can never be too far in the backwoods if someone at the bar's wearing tortoiseshell glasses. He's perfect for you. I'm parched." "Me too," I said. "I'll go," said Leulah. "What do you want?" "We didn't drive all the way to this shantytown to purchase our own beverages," said Jade. "Blue? My cigarettes please." I took them out of my purse and handed them to her. Jade's pack of Marlboro Lights was the instrument (boleadoras) she used to ambush unsuspecting men (cimarron). (Jade's best subject—the only one at which she excelled—was Spanish.) She began by roaming the bar (estancias), singling out an attractive, beefy guy standing a little apart from everyone else (vaca perdida, or lost cow). She approached him slowly and with no sudden jerks of the head or hands, tapped him lightly on the shoulder. "Got a light, hombre?" There were two inevitable scenarios this opening evoked: 1. He eagerly obliged. 2. If he didn't have a light, he started a frantic quest to find one. "Steve, got a light? Arnie, you? Henshaw? A light. Matches okay too. McMundy, you? Cig—know if Marcie has one? Go ask—right. Does Jeff? No? I'll go ask the bartender." Unfortunately, if the outcome was #2, by the time the cimarron returned with fire, Jade was already on the lookout for more lost cattle. He'd stand motionlessly at her back for a minute, sometimes up to five or ten minutes, not doing anything but chewing his lower lip and staring straight ahead, occasionally mooing a dreary "Excuse me?" at her back or shoulder. Eventually, she acknowledged him. "Hmm? Oh, gracias, chiquito." If she was feeling at home on the range, she tossed him two questions: 1. Where do you see yourself in, say, twenty years, cavron? 2. What's your favorite position?

134 MÂRISHA PESSL Most of the time he was unable to answer either off the top of his head, but even if he answered #2 without hesitation, if he said, "Assistant Manager of Sales and Marketing at Axel Corp, where I work and I'm months away from a promotion," Jade had no choice but to butcher him and cook him immediately over an open fire (the asado). "Unfortunately we have nothing else to talk about. Beat it, muchacho." Most of the time he didn't react, only stared at her with drippy, red eyes. "Vamos!" she shouted. Biting our lips in suppressed laughter, Leulah and I raced after her, hacking our way across the room (pampas), fertile with elbows, shoulders, big hair and beer cups, all the way to GIRLS. Jade elbowed past the dozen muchachas standing in line, telling them I was pregnant and about to be sick. "Bullshit!" "If she's pregnant how come she's so scrawny?" "And why's she drinkin? Don't alcohol cause preemies?" "Oh, stop hurting your cerebrums, putas," said Jade. We took turns laughing and peeing in the handicapped stall. Sometimes, if the lighting of Jade's cigarette was done with swift precision, she began to have a real conversation, though it was usually so loud, most of it consisted of Jade firing off more questions and the guy mooing, "Huh?" over and over as if trapped in a Beckett play. Occasionally, the guy had a friend who rested his heavy load of a gaze on Leulah, and once, a man with apparent color blindness and more hair than an Old English Sheepdog fixed his gaze on me. Jade nodded excitedly and pulled her own earlobe (her sign for "This is the one"), but when the guy bent his bushy head down to inquire how I was "likin' Leisure City," for some reason I couldn't think of anything to say. (" 'Fine' is mind-numbing. Never ever say, 'fine,' Retch. And, another thing. Granted, he's hot as hell, but if you bring up your dad in conversation one more time, I'll cut out your tongue.") After too long a pause I said, "Not much." Frankly, I was a little terrified of how he leaned over me, so confident of his beer breath and his chin, which, underneath the masses of hair, appeared to be modeled after a sugar cone, how his eyes looked down my front as if he'd like nothing better than to lift my hood and inspect my carburetor. "Not much" wasn't the answer he was looking for, because he forced a smile and set about trying to raise Leulah's hood. There were times too, when I'd glance back to the spot by the door

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 135 where Jade, minutes before, had been inspecting her Angus bull, trying to decide if he was worth buying to improve her herd—and she wasn't there. She wasn't anywhere, not by the jukebox, or by the girl showing another girl her gold necklace —"He got me this, innit sweet?" (it looked like a gilded thumbnail) —not in the breath-dampened hallway that lead to the back by the couches and pinball machines, not by the man fossilized at the bar mesmerized by closed captions ("A tragedy coming out of Burns County this evening with a robbery that left three dead. Cherry Jeffries is live at the scene."). The first time it happened, I was terrified (I'd read The Girl Done Gone [1982] by Eileen Crown when I was too young and thus it'd made a gruesome impression) and immediately, I alerted Leulah (who, though she looked prim and old-fashioned, could turn pretty vixeny with her nosegay smile, the way she coiled her thick braid around her hand and spoke in a little-girl voice so men tilted over her like big beach umbrellas trying to block the sun). "Where's Jade?" I asked. "I don't see her." "Around," she said airily, not looking away from a guy named Luke with a white T-shirt like cling film and arms like basement lead pipes. Using words with no more than two syllables, he was telling her the fascinating story of how he'd been kicked out of West Point for hazing. "But I don't see her," I said nervously, my eyes wandering the room. "She's in the bathroom." "Is she all right?" "Sure." Leulah's eyes were hooked to Luke's face; it was like the guy was Dickens, fucking Samuel Clemens. I pushed my way into the GIRLS bathroom. "Jade?" It was sticky, murky as unclean aquariums. Girls in tube tops and tight pants swarmed the mirror, applying lipstick, running fingernails through hair stiff as soft-drink straws. Unrolled toilet paper wormed along the floor and the hand dryer shrieked, though no one dried their hands. "Jade? Jade? Hello?" I crouched down and spotted her green metallic sandals in the handicapped stall. "Jade? Are you okay?" "Oh, for fuck's sake, what is it? WHAT?.'" She unlatched the door. It bashed against the wall. She marched out.

136 UAKMA PESSL Behind her, stuffed between the toilet and the toilet-paper dispenser, was a man, approximately forty-five years old with a thick brown beard that cut his face into crude shapes first graders tape to windows during Art Time. He wore a jean jacket too short in the sleeves and looked as if he'd respond to various shouted commands, including, "C'mere boy!" and "Sick 'em!" His belt was undone, hanging like a rattlesnake. "Oh, I-I-" I stuttered. " I - " "Are you dying?" Her face was pale green in the light, seal slick. Fine gold hairs stuck to her temples in question marks and exclamation points. "No," I said. "Are you planning to die anytime soon?" "No-" "Then what are you bothering me for? What am I, your fucking mother?" She turned on her heel, slammed the door, and locked it. "What a bitchy slut," said a Hispanic woman reapplying liquid eyeliner at the sink, her top lip stretched tight over her teeth like Saran Wrap over leftovers. "That your friend?" I nodded, somewhat dazed. "You kick her skanky ass." There were times, to my infinite horror, Leulah disappeared, too, for fifteen, sometimes twenty, minutes into GIRLS (Beatrice had come a long way in seven hundred years; so had Annabel Lee) and afterward, she and Jade both sported pleased, even conceited looks on their faces, as if, in that handicapped stall they believed they'd single-handedly come to the last digit of pi, discovered who killed Kennedy, found the Missing Link. (From the looks of some the guys they brought in with them, maybe they had.) "Blue should try it," Leulah said once on the drive home. "No way" Jade said. "You have to be a pro." Obviously, I wanted to ask them what they thought they were doing, but I sensed they didn't care to know what Robard Neverovich, the Russian who'd volunteered in more than 234 American runaway shelters, wrote in Kill Me (1999) or his follow-up account of his trip to Thailand to investigate the child porn industry, Wanting It All, All At Once (2003). It was evident Jade and Leulah were doing just fine, thank you, and certainly didn't need the feedback of a girl who stands "deaf and dumb when some dude wants to

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 137 buy her a hurricane," who "wouldn't know what to do with a guy if she had a manual with illustrations and an interactive CD-rom." But at the same time, as scared as I was every time one of them vanished, afterward, when we were back in the Mercedes; when they were howling over some scab they'd taken into GIRLS together, who'd emerged from that handicapped stall with a sort of madness and, as we walked outside, chased after them shouting, "Cammie! Ashley!" (the names on their fake IDs) before the bouncer threw him down like a sack of potatoes; when Jade was speeding back to her house, crisscrossing between semis and Leulah screamed for no reason, head back, hair tangling around the headrest, her arms reaching out of the sunroof as if grabbing at the tiny stars sticking to the sky and picking them off like lint, I noticed there was something incredible about them, something brave, that no one in my immediate recollection had written about—not really. I doubted I could write about it either, being "the total flat tire in any bar or club," except that they seemed to inhabit a completely different world than the one I did —a world that was hilarious, without repercussion or revolting neon light or stickiness or rug bum, a world in which they ruled.

There was one night that wasn't like the others. "This is it, Hurl," Jade said. "The night that will change your everything." It was the first Friday of November and Jade had gone to considerable lengths to pick out my outfit: four-inch malevolent gold sandals two sizes too big and a gold lamé dress that rippled all over me like a Shar-pei (see "Traditional Wife's Bound Feet," History of China, Ming, 1961, p. 214; "Darcel," Remembering "SolidGold"LaVitte, 1989, p. 29). It was one of the rare occasions someone at the Blind actually approached me—a guy in his thirties named Larry, heavy as a keg of beer. He was attractive only in the way of a seriously unfinished Michelangelo sculpture. There were tiny patches of remarkable detail in his delicate nose, full lips, even in his large, well-molded hands, but the rest of him—shoulders, torso, legs—had not been liberated from the raw slab of marble, nor would they be any time soon. He'd bought me an Amstel Light and stood close to me while he talked about quitting smoking. It had been the most difficult thing he'd ever done in his life. "Patch is the greatest thing medical science's

138 MAR1SHÂ PESSL come up with. They should use that technology for everything. Don't know 'bout you, but I got no problem eatin' and drinkin' with the patch. Days you're really busy. 'Stead of fast food, ya stick on the patch. Half hour later? You're full. We could all have sex with the patch too. Sure save everyone a lot of time and energy. What's yer name?" "Roxanne Kaye Loomis." "What do you do, Roxy?" "I attend Clemson University with a major in engineering. I'm from Dukers, N.C. Also an organ donor." Larry nodded and took a long drink of his beer, shifting his heavy body toward me so my leg pressed against his chunky one. I took a tiny step in the only other possible direction, bumping into the back of a girl with thorny blond hair. " 'Scuse you," she said. I tried stepping back in the other direction but effigy-Larry was there. I was a piece of hard candy stuck in a throat. "Where do you see yourself in, say, twenty years?" I asked. He didn't answer. In fact, he looked as if he didn't speak English anymore. He was losing altitude, and fast. It was like the afternoon Dad and I parked the Volvo station wagon a few meters from the end of the airport runway in Luton, Texas, and spent an hour sitting on the hood, eating pimento cheese sandwiches and watching the planes land. Watching the planes was like floating in the depths of the ocean and observing a 105-foot Blue Whale drift over you, but unlike the private jets, the airbuses, and the 747s, Larry actually crashed. His lips hit my teeth and his tongue darted into my mouth like a tadpole escaping from a jar. He slapped a hand onto my chest, squeezing my right breast like a lemon over dover sole. "Blue?" I tore myself away. Leulah and Jade stood next to me. "We're blowing this joint," Jade said. Larry shouted (a markedly unenthusiastic "Wait a minute, Roxy!"), but I didn't turn around. I followed them outside to the car. "Where are we going?" "To see Hannah," Jade said flatly. "By the way, Retch, what's up with your taste in men? That guy was fugly." Lu was staring at her apprehensively, her green Bellmondo prom dress sagging open at the neck in a permanent yawn. "I don't think it's a good idea."

SPECIAL TOPICS IK CALAMITY PHYSICS 139 Jade made a face. "Why not?" "I don't want her to see us," Lu said. Jade yanked on her seatbelt. "We'll take another car. Jefferson's boyfriend's. His heinous Toyota's in our driveway." "What's going on?" I asked. "We'll probably bump into Charles," Jade said, ignoring me, glancing at Lu as she jammed the key in the ignition and started the car. "He'll be wearing camouflage and those night-vision goggle things." Lu shook her head. "He's with Black on a double date. Sophomores." Jade turned around to see if I'd overheard this (a triumphantly sympathetic look on her face), then accelerated out of the parking lot, merging onto the highway and heading toward Stockton. It was a cold night, with thin, greasy clouds streaking the sky. I pulled the gold lamé tight over my knees, staring at the passing cars and Lu's fancy parenthesis profile, the taillights signaling her cheekbones. Neither of them spoke. Their silence was one of those tired adult silences, that of a married couple driving home from a dinner party, not wanting to talk about someone's husband getting too drunk or how they secretly didn't want to go home with each other but someone new, someone whose freckles they didn't know. Forty minutes later, Jade had disappeared inside her house for the car keys—"Only be a sec"—and when she emerged, still in her rickety red sandals and firebird dress (it looked like she'd gone through the garbage at a rich kid's birthday, removed the most exotic scraps of wrapping paper and taped them to herself), she carried a six-pack of Heineken, two giant bags of potato chips and a pack of spaghetti licorice, one piece dangling from her mouth. Looped around her shoulder was a giant pair of binoculars. "We're going to Hannah's house?" I asked, still confused, but Jade only ignored me again, dumping the food into the backseat of the beat-up white Toyota parked by the garage. Leulah looked furious (her lips were pulled tightly together like a fabric change purse), but without a word, she walked across the driveway, climbed into the front seat and slammed the door. "Fuck." Jade squinted at her watch. "We don't have much time." Minutes later, we were in the Toyota, merging onto the highway again, this time heading north, the opposite direction of Hannah's house. I knew it was pointless to ask where we were going; both of them had fallen into that trench-silence again, a silence so deep it was difficult and tiring to heave oneself out. Leulah stared at the road, the sputtering white lines, the drifting red

140 MARISHA PESSL sequins of the cars. Jade was more or less her usual self, though as she chewed a strand of licorice (the girl was chain-licoricing; "Hand me another one/' she demanded three times before I wedged the packet by the emergency brake), she wouldn't stop fiddling with the radio. We drove a half hour before swerving down Exit 42—"Cottonwood," read the sign—barreling across the deserted two-lane road into a truck stop. A gas station was off to our left, and, in front of the eighteen-wheelers slung across the pavement like dead whales, a wooden A-framed restaurant sat glumly on bald hill. STTJCKEY'S, announced the yellow letters over the entrance. Jade was slinking the Toyota between the trucks. "See her car?" she asked. Leulah shook her head. "It's already 2:30. Maybe she's not coming." "She's coming." We circled the lot until Leulah tapped a fingernail on the window. "There." She was indicating Hannah's red Subaru; it was sandwiched between a white pickup truck and a van. Jade swung into the next row and reversed into a spot by a bank of pine needles and the road. Leulah flung off her seatbelt, crossed her arms, and Jade blithely helped herself to another black shoelace, gnawing one end, and wrapping the other fast around her knuckles like a boxer before he puts on his gloves. Hannah's Subaru was in front of us, two lines of cars away. Across the parking lot on the hill slumped the restaurant, legally blind (three windows in the back boarded up) and seriously balding (roofing coming off in clumps). You couldn't see much in the dimmed windows—a few shifts of tired color, a row of green lamps hanging down like moldy showerheads — but one didn't have to go inside to know the menus were sticky, the tables seasoned with pie crumb, the waitresses crabby, the clientele beefy. One definitely had to beat the saltshaker senseless — maggotlike grains of rice visible inside—to coax out a mere speck of salt. ("If they can't do salt, I wonder what makes them think they can do chicken cacciatore," Dad would say in such a place, holding the menu at a safe distance from his face in case it sprang to life.) I hunched forward and cleared my throat, a signal for Jade or Lu to explain what we were doing at this awful roadie watering hole (a place Dad and I would go to great distances to avoid; it wasn't unheard for us to take a twenty-mile detour simply to avoid breaking bread with "men and women who, if one squinted, resembled piles of tires") but when they still said nothing (Lu, too, was stuffing her mouth with licorice now, chewing goatishly) I

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS HI realized it was one of those things they couldn't put into words. Putting it into words made it real and they'd be guilty of something. For ten minutes, the only sound was an occasional door slam—some loot-stomached trucker coming, going, starving, stuffed—and the angry hisses of the freeway. Visible through the dark trees edging the parking lot was a bridge with an endless bullet-fire of cars, red-and-white sparks shooting into the night. "Who'll it be?" Jade asked blandly, looking through the binoculars. Lu shrugged, chewing her licorice cud. "Don't know." "Fat or skinny." "Skinny." "See, I think pork this time." "She doesn't like pork." "Yes, she does. They're her Beluga. Reserved for special occasions. Oh." Jade jolted forward, banging the binoculars on the windshield. "Oh, fuck me . . . shit." "What—is he a baby?" Jade's mouth was open. Her lips moved, but there were no words. Then she exhaled heavily: "Ever seen Breakfast at Tiffany's?" "No," Lu said sarcastically, putting her hands on the dashboard and leaning forward to survey the two people who'd just emerged from the restaurant. "Well"—without looking away from the binoculars, Jade's right hand plunged into the bag of chips and stuffed a clump into her mouth —"it's that awful Doc person. Only ancient. Normally, I'd say at least it's not Rusty Trawler, but in this case I'm not so sure." She sat back, swallowed, and, with a grim look, handed Lu the binoculars. "Rusty has teeth." After a quick glimpse (a revolted expression spilled all over her face), Lu handed me the binoculars. I swallowed and pressed them to my eyes: Hannah Schneider had just left the restaurant. She was walking with a man. "I always hated Doc," Lu said softly. Hannah was dolled up as I'd never seen her before ("painted," they'd say at Coventry Academy) wearing a furry black coat—I guessed rabbit, due to its teenybopperish look (the zipper graced with a pompom)—gold hoops, dark lipstick charring her mouth. Her hair recoiled from her shoulders and sharp, white high heels peered out of the cuffs of her Saran-tight jeans. When I shifted the binoculars to inspect her companion, I immediately felt sick, because in comparison to Hannah, he was shriveled. Wrinkles Etch A Sketched

142 MAR1SHA PESSL his face. He was in his late sixties, maybe even early seventies, shorter than she and skinny as a roadside curb. His torso and shoulders were meatless, like thick plaid flannel had been chucked over a picture frame. His hair was pretty thick, his hairline not eroding (his lone, remotely attractive feature). It mopped up whatever light was around, going green as they passed under the floodlight, then an oxidized, bicycle-spoke gray. As he moved down the steps after her—Hannah was walking swiftly, unzipping a weird pink fur purse, searching for her car keys—his bony legs jerked out to the sides like a retractable drying rack. "Retch, you going to let anyone else look or what?" I handed Jade the binoculars. She peered through them, gnawing her lip. "Hope he brought Viagra," she muttered. Lu slouched down in her seat and froze as they climbed into Hannah's car. "Oh, for God's sake, you idiot, she can't see us," Jade said irritably, though she, too, sat very still, waiting for the Subaru to move out of its space, sneaking behind one of the semis, before starting the car. "Where are they going?" I asked, though I wasn't sure I wanted to know. "Fleabag motel," Jade said. "She'll bang the guy for a half-hour to fortyfive minutes, then throw him out. I'm always surprised she doesn't bite off his head like a praying mantis." We followed the Subaru (maintaining a polite distance) for three, maybe four miles, soon entering what I assumed was Cottonwood. It was one of those skin-and-bone towns Dad and I had driven through a million times, a town wan and malnourished; somehow it managed to survive on nothing but gas stations, motels, and McDonald's. Big scablike parking lots scarred the sides of the road. After fifteen minutes, Hannah switched on her blinker and turned left into a motel, the Country Style Motor Lodge, a white flat arc-shaped building sitting in the middle of a barren lot like a lost pair of dentures. A few maple trees sulked close to the road, others slouched suggestively in front of the Registration Office, as if mimicking the clientele. We pulled in thirty seconds after her, but quickly swung to the right, stopping by a gray sedan, while Hannah parked by the office and disappeared inside. Two or three minutes later, when she reappeared, slimy light from the carport splattered her face and her expression scared me. I saw it only for a few seconds (and

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS 143 she wasn't exactly close) but to me, she looked like an off TV—no breathy soap opera or courtroom drama, not even a wan western rerun — just blank. She climbed back into the Subaru, started the car, and slowly pulled past us. "Shit," squeaked Lu, slipping down in the seat. "Oh please," Jade said. "You'd be the crummiest assassin." The car stopped in front of one of the rooms on the far left. Doc emerged with his hands in his pockets, Hannah with a minute grin spearing her face. She unlocked the door and they disappeared inside. "Room 22," Jade reported from behind the binoculars. Hannah must have immediately pulled the curtains, because when a light flicked on, the drapes, the color of orange cheddar, were completely closed, without a splinter through them. "Does she know him?" I asked. It was more a far-flung hope than an actual question. Jade shook her head. "Nope." She turned around in the seat, staring at me. "Charles and Milton found out about it last year. They were out one night, decided to swing by her house but then passed her car. They followed her all the way out here. She starts at Stuckey's at 1:45. Eats. Picks one out. The first Friday of every month. It's the one date she keeps." "What do you mean?" "You know. She's pretty disorganized. Well, not about this." "And she doesn't. . . know you know?" "No way." Her eyes pelted my face. "And don't even think about telling her." "I won't," I said, glancing at Lu, but she didn't seem to be listening. She sat in her seat as if strapped to an electric chair. "So what happens now?" I asked. "A taxi pulls up. He'll emerge from the room with half his clothes, sometimes his shirt balled in his hands or without his socks. And then he'll limp away in the taxi. Probably back to Stuckey's where he'll get into his truck, drive off to who knows where. Hannah leaves in the morning." "How do you know?" "Charles usually stays the whole time." I didn't especially want to ask any more questions, so the three of us lapsed into silence again, a quiet that went on even after Jade moved the car closer so we could make out the 22, the safari leaf pattern on the pulled curtains and the dent in Hannah's car. It was strange, the wartime

144 MAR1SHA PESSL effect of the parking lot. We were stationed somewhere, oceans from home, afraid of things unseen. Leulah was shell-shocked, back straight as a flagpole, her eyes magnetized to the door. Jade was the senior officer, crabby, worn-out and perfectly aware nothing she said could comfort us so she only reclined her seat, turned on the radio and shoved potato chips into her mouth. I sort of Vietnamed too. I was the cowardly homesick one who ends up dying unheroically from a wound he accidently inflicts upon himself that squirts blood like a grape Capri Sun. I wouldVe given my left hand to be away from this place. My Pie in the Sky was to be next to Dad again, wearing cloud flannel pajamas and grading a few of his student research papers, even the awful ones by the slacker who employed a huge bold font in order to reach Dad's minimum requirement of twenty to twenty-five pages. I remembered what Dad said when I was seven at the Screamfest Fantasy Circus in Choke, Indiana, after we'd taken the House of Horrors ride and I'd been so terrified I'd ridden the thing with my fingers nailed to my eyes— never peeking, never once glimpsing a single horror. After I pried my hands off my face, rather than chastising my cowardice, Dad had looked down at me and nodded thoughtfully, as if I'd just revealed startling new insights on revolutionizing welfare. 'Tes," he'd said. "Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging—not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself—it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only eyewitnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees." "Promise I won't ever do this," Lu said suddenly in a mousey voice. "What," said Jade in a monotone, her eyes papercuts. "When I'm old." Her voice was something frail you could tear right through. "Promise me I'll be married with kids. Or famous. That. . ." There wasn't an end to her sentence. It just stopped, a grenade that'd been thrown but hadn't exploded. None of us said anything more, and at 4:03 A.M. someone turned off the lights in Room 22. We watched the man emerge, fully clothed (though his heels, I noticed, were not fully inside his shoes) and he drove away in the rusty Blue Bird Taxicab (I-8OO-BLU-BIRD), purring as it waited for him by the Registration Office. It was just as Dad said (if he'd been in the car with us he would have

SPECIAL TOPICS m CALAMITY PHYSICS 145 tipped up his chin, just a little, raised an eyebrow, his gesture for both Never Doubt Me and I Told You So) because the only eyewitnesses should have been the neon sign shuddering VACANCY, and the thin asthmatic trees seductively trailing their branches down the spine of the roof, and the sky, a big purple bruise fading too slowly over our heads. We drove home.

/

HTAwo weeks after the night we spied on Hannah ("Observed," Chief Inl spector Ranulph Curry clarified in The Conceit of a Unicom [Lavelle, X 1901]), Nigel found an invitation in the wastepaper basket in her den, the tiny room off the living room filled with world atlases and half-dead hanging plants barely surviving on her version of flora life support (twenty-fourhour plant lights, periodic Miracle-Gro). It was elegant, printed on a thick, cream, embossed card.

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